Neil Lennon branded Leigh Griffiths a huge letdown as he launched an astonishing attack on the Celtic striker.
The former Hoops boss slammed the Parkhead frontman - who says new boss Ange Postecoglou is keen to keep him - for the condition he returned to the club in for pre-season.
And Lennon revealed how Griffiths snubbed the opportunity to use the club’s training facilities at Lennoxtown during lockdown.
Lennon and Griffiths were at loggerheads at the start of their 10 In A Row bid when he was left out of the club’s camp in the Midlands.
That came due to concerns over his fitness and Griffiths failed to make an impact during the season which resulted in him missing out on a place in Scotland’s Euro 2020 squad.
Griffiths said on Wednesday that if he was fit enough for the bench he was fit enough to play, and hinted that he felt he'd been given a raw deal by the departed manager.
But Lennon hit back in a BBC Radio Scotland interview as he laid out a brutal criticism of the man he signed from Hibs in 2014: “He let himself down.
“He’s on full pay for the three months of lockdown and he comes back, totally out-of-condition and a stone overweight, when he couldn’t afford to be because he hadn’t played much football in the previous 18 months to two years.
“We had worked really hard with him to get him back on track and before lockdown, he was in the team and back scoring goals and doing absolutely fine and then he comes back completely out-of-condition, way, way behind any of the rest of them and for me, that was totally unacceptable.
“Leigh’s trying to make it out that it was alright and it’s not. He’s saying, ‘I’ll prove people wrong’ – but he hasn’t proved anybody wrong.
“He’s not at the level of being a Champions League player, he didn’t get picked for Scotland, you have to ask why.
“He’ll say he didn’t play enough games but towards the end of the season I wasn’t there, John obviously felt that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind or condition to play for Celtic, which is a very high standard and I don’t think Leigh got anywhere near those standards over the last year or so.
“It depends where you are aiming your career. To play at the top level, European level, he’s got a lot to do, I think. A helluva lot to do.
“Even if he is in decent condition, he hasn’t got the pace anymore. He needs to be slimline, he needs to be sharp - that is his game.
“But the bottom line is, if I had a fit and hungry Leigh Griffiths last season, he would have played, because I signed him!
“I brought him back into the team when under Brendan Rodgers, he was nowhere near it.
“We worked incredibly hard with him – there is no excuse to not be in top condition.
“There’s a deflection as well, he shouldn’t be talking about other players, talk about yourself.”
Lennon told how Celtic opened their doors to help the players improve their fitness during lockdown and said: “The three months off, we opened the training ground.
“You couldn’t come into the building but my fitness coach set up fitness training for the players everyday. So you would come in, in groups of two and train for an hour a day - fitness work, everyday.
“Callum McGregor, Scott Brown, James Forrest, Greg Taylor, Jonny Hayes - all the lads that lived in Scotland, the foreign boys were away, but all the boys in Scotland came in. Leigh didn’t come in one day, not one day during the lockdown.”
