Neil Lennon has spoken about an interesting mishap he had one time when he was scouting Teemu Pukki.
The Northern Irishman was out in Finland with Johan Mjallby, taking a look at the forward who would go on to be a bit of a flop in Glasgow.
The Celtic management pair were doing the scouting but had an unfortunate incident as Lennon explained.
“It was quite a funny story,” he told the Daily Record. We went to the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki and there was nobody there. Turned out we’d gone to the wrong city!
“We had to go back to the airport and hop on another flight. We ended up catching him for the last half hour. But he showed more than enough in that 30 minutes to convince us to take a punt on him.”
Maybe Lennon should have scouted Pukki further
While the story is obviously pretty amusing in retrospect, it does also raise some questions about the efficiency of Lennon’s work.
It seems a bit crazy that he and Mjallby would make such a glaring error when on official club business. Perhaps if they had managed to catch Pukki’s full display then they would have decided not to spend £2.25million on the player who would go on to score just nine goals for the club.
Pukki is now flying high in the English Premier League with newly promoted Norwich City. He was pretty poor in his time at Celtic after being brought in to replace goal machine Gary Hooper.
His bizarre career path just goes to show that you never know when a player in going to come to the fore.
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