I've been very harsh on Lennon and I honestly wish events would transpire in a way where I could become his biggest cheerleader. However, he continues to state things in public which are dubious or, in some cases, provably wrong. The latest comment which I initially took as...

plausible was that Brown is a "slow starter" so decided to test that idea. Lennon's comments about Brown improving in recent games is provably false- he had a single decent game at Ross County in between 8 poor performances. I wanted his characterization to be true, but....no.

I went back through the 1st 9 games Brown played each season since 2015-2016 and compared with the next 9 games. I do not see any discernable pattern in his performance data which suggests anything reliable. Assuming natural recency bias, I decided to examine last season closely.

I adjusted the various defensive statistics for possession each game, then also did the same for turnovers, to calculate a net gain/loss amount. The simple idea is to look at how many times Brown won a defensive duel, intercepted a ball, or recovered a ball, then minus turnovers.

The adjustment for possession is to create some normalization depending upon quality of opponents and nature of a game. Brown's Adj Defensive Duels did improve last season from 1st 9 games to 2nd 9 games by about 23%. Unfortunately, interceptions declined by 22%,

recoveries by 15%, and turnovers increased by 74%. When those are all netted out, the decline was about 29%. So far this season, his output is down further, or a total of 35% below the 1st 9 games of last season. Lennon has played Brown in 786 of 845 available minutes so far

this season vs 738/680/477/470 for Christie/Forrest/Ntcham/Moi. It is certainly possible that Brown's output will improve, but I see no evidence to suggest it reliably will, and it would have to improve dramatically to warrant being a starter. Despite rhetoric about managing

his time and rotating, Celtic now face the prospects of Brown playing 6 games in 19 days, assuming a victory on Thursday, after already playing in 93% of available minutes. I made my analysis heading into the season based upon avg aging curves with the caveat that Brown's value

as a player was particularly vulnerable due to its reliance on physical speed/agility. It has been even worse than I feared, and encapsulated by the fact that McGregor has more successful defensive actions per 90 minutes in the league so far. Lennon seems hell bent on playing

the performance output equivalent of 2019-2020 Gary Dicker in Europe and vs Hibs and Rangers. The rest of the midfield played extremely well Saturday and yet chance creation remained below avg. This is like a hockey coach knowingly playing a penalty kill team all the time. End.