WHAT does the life of Neil Lennon tell us about modern Scotland? I’m not – as anyone who knows me will confirm – a big man for the football. I’m not even a small man for the football. I’ve no team, no colours, no football patter. I couldn’t distinguish a 4-4-2 formation from a 4-5-1 regime. I’ve no thoughts on the offside rule. No insight into the tactical conclusions to be drawn from conceding a set-piece. No strong feelings on whether Alex McLeish is right to run Kieran Tierney and Stephen O’Donnell out of position.

But I’m interested in law, and justice, and politics, and culture. And it seems to me this week that Neil Lennon is an important figure on all of these axes. George Orwell argued that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”.

For me, one of the challenges of living thoughtfully in this country is to keep your memory and to remember what isn’t in front of your nose. To see what happens today against the backdrop of everything that has gone before is also a constant struggle. It seems like a struggle in which too many people are prepared to surrender.

Scottish society is inclined towards convenient explanations. We’re unoriginal in that respect. But Neil Lennon’s experiences of living and working here demand inconvenient explanations.

Explanations which are not couched in the easy language of individual wrongdoing, neatly isolating wider society from any responsibility for the startlingly rough working life this man has endured.

I’m sure most Hearts fans deplore the decking of the Hibs manager. But the fact Lennon has – yet again – been knocked off his feet must mean more than a boozy, reckless coin-collector in Tynecastle had a spare quid needing flinging. The incident – like all the others – is more eloquent than that.

Born in Lurgan in 1971, capped by Northern Ireland, hired by Celtic, and appointed Hibernian manager in 2016, Neil Lennon has made a substantial part of his life in this country. And how has Scotland repaid him? This week in Tynecastle, it did so in a handful of loose change. In Edinburgh, an anonymous graffiti artist sprayed Russell Road with the legend “Hang Neil Lennon” in maroon.

Football, like politics, seems to live in a constant present. There is always the next match, the next tie, the tactics, the shifting roster of the team. But like politics, football is a world of old war stories, half-remembered battles, tales of allegiances forged and abandoned, of great plays, canny tactics, and all those cherished rough calls by referees and the fouls which escaped all sanction.

But tot up all Neil Lennon’s experiences, reckon with what living and working in Scotland has inflicted on this man, and what you find is almost twenty years spent under the almost constant, unconscionable threat of violence by strangers.

I don’t know what that does to a person. Lennon perseveres. I admire that in a character. But we seem to forget. If we force ourselves to wake up – if we take his experiences seriously rather than rendering them a lazy tabloid footnote – what does it tell us about our society that a smart, passionate, edgy, ginger, Northern Irish man of Catholic origins finds himself exposed to such a remarkable level of not only of vitriol, but violence?

The instances are so many, they may be too easily forgotten. In 2002, he received death threats which took him off the field against Cyprus. Later, making his life in Scotland, Lennon’s life has been punctuated by violence, both imagined and real. In September 2008, Jeffrey Carrigan and David Whitelaw hospitalised him after an attack in Ashton Lane in Glasgow in the early hours of the morning.

The two co-accused painted him as the aggressor, but the court rejected both of their defences. Jailing them for two years apiece, Sheriff Martin Jones found Lennon was “curled up, trying to protect himself and offering no resistance” to the attack and was “rendered unconscious” by the violence visited upon him. Carrigan and Whitelaw left Lennon prone on the cobbles of the lane – and fled.

In 2011, Hearts fan John Wilson faced a full jury trial for an attack on Lennon executed on live TV. The evidence showed Wilson had invaded the pitch, approached the dug-out, shouted at Lennon, and landed a blow on the Celtic manager’s head. Wilson essentially admitted assault. But the Edinburgh jury, bafflingly, acquitted Wilson of the aggravated charge on a “not proven” verdict.

Sheriff Fiona Reith hit the pitch invader with an eight month sentence for breach of the peace – but it can’t be said that justice was done for Lennon, who watched himself being assaulted on digital telly, and saw his attacker go unpunished. But even that wasn’t the end of his trials.

In the same year, he received bullets in the post. In 2012, two more middle-aged men – Trevor Muirhead and Neil McKenzie – were jailed for five years for sending him parcel bombs. A rough amalgam of nails, petrol, sports watches, peroxide, and scrap metal – the explosives weren’t viable.

MUIRHEAD and McKenzie were amateurs and bungled it. But the evidence showed they believed the parcels they sent were capable of detonating. In the same year, another man was convicted of circulating Lennon’s picture, covered in bullet wounds.

For you and me, these are just points on a timeline, just newsflashes on the BBC website. But for Neil Lennon, this is life, integrated, consistent and sustained over the better part of the last 20 years. The blackouts. The bombs. The fists. Life encourages many of us to grow a tougher carapace. Our skins grow thicker. But no skin should have to grow this thick.

Nobody should be forced to live a life constantly punctuated by this level of menace.

For a segment of the Scottish population, this sparky, uncowed Lurgan boy seems unconscionable. And yet he keeps taking to his feet, again, and again, and again. He hasn’t elected an easy life. Instead, he stays around. He perseveres, and perseveres.

Some folk are looking for easy excuses. Some folk are inclined to overlook and minimise what has happened. Some folk want a pretext to make the garrulous Lennon the author of his own misfortune, as if the gay man provoked the homophobe into attacking him, or the racist was only stirred into abusing his victim, because they happened to shoot a smart nswer back.

The French philosopher René Girard wrote about the scapegoating. See it once, and you’ll see it everywhere. The sins and suspicions of the community are poured into a convenient, unlovely object, who becomes the general victim for our blacker impulses and anxieties.

As Girard recognised, violence is often called irrational, but it almost always has its reasons. But “when unappeased violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand”.

For too many of Scotland’s bigots, Neil Lennon has been close at hand for two decades, with his red hair and his attitude, the perfect surrogate victim for all their sectarian twitches and twinges. On Friday, the Hibs manager said: “If a black man is abused, you’re not just abusing the colour of his skin – you’re abusing his culture, heritage, his background.

“It’s the exact same when I get called a Fenian, a pauper, a beggar, a tarrier. These people have a sense of entitlement, or a superiority complex, and all I do is stand up for myself.”

In sport as in politics, some people become lightning rods while others struggle to conduct a single electron. Football may bore you. But don’t shut your eyes. Lennon’s is much, much more than a footballing story.