In the aftermath of a defeat by their city rivals that plunged Hibernian headlong into a crisis, Chris Cadden hobbled out of the dressing room at Tynecastle, clutching his back and grimacing slightly. It had been a painful experience, for all sorts of reasons.
Having conceded four to Celtic the previous midweek, Hibs succumbed 3-0 to Hearts and, in so doing, extended their miserable run to nine losses in 11 matches. It was scant reward for Cadden, who had bust a gut to be available for a game that does more than any other to shape opinion in Edinburgh.
“I’m drugged up to the eyeballs,” he admitted. “My back’s been toiling since the Celtic game. But it was a derby, so I wasn’t going to miss it. I just took everything I could, just threw everything at it. And, as you can see, I’m struggling a bit now. I didn’t want to miss the game. It was tough, but I got through it.”
Maybe, but Hibs didn’t, at least not with anything to be positive about. Cadden was among several who played through the pain barrier, but it was nothing to the hurt being felt in and around the club after a dismal derby display. “It’s not good enough,” said the full back. “Everybody knows it’s a great football club. We’ve let the fans down, people down, and it’s tough to take.”
Many Hibs players are now fearing for their future, having been hung out to dry by their fed-up manager on Monday night. What a lacerating attack on them it was by Lee Johnson who has given up pretending that, if only his team were a little more streetwise in both penalty areas, they would be challenging for a place in Europe.
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It was time, he said, to “come out swinging” — against the squad he inherited at the end of last season and against the club whose incompetence had got them into this mess. What Hibs needed now was a “revolution” in which up to 10 players — the “dead wood” — were shown the door. He questioned those players’ “football IQ”, their ability to manipulate the ball and even suggested that the fittest ones were running around like “busy fools”.
Cadden is surely not one of those whose “mediocrity” Johnson is “sick to death” of. Nor is Kevin Nisbet, Joe Newell, Aiden McGeady and Ryan Porteous, all of whose quality has been namechecked by the manager. But they and their team-mates must be wincing at his public savaging of the squad, a large part of which will be gone by the end of this transfer window.
“The results haven’t been good enough and this is a results-based business,” says Cadden. “It’s a harsh business. [If] people don’t get results, they get moved on… simple as that. All we can do as players is go out and give 100 per cent. I’ll do everything I can.
“Obviously, we’ve now got the January window. If results aren’t good enough then you look to bring quality players in. Every team in the country would like to bring quality players in. Hopefully we can get that to help us.”
Hibs are eighth in the Premiership table, just four points clear of second-bottom Dundee United, who have played a game fewer. They have won only seven of their 20 league matches this season, but even that doesn’t tell the whole story. All of their goals in five of those victories have come after an opposing player has been sent off. In other words, Hibs have beaten 11 men only twice this season. One of their two draws arrived courtesy of a last-minute equaliser against nine-man Rangers.
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Hibs are paying the price for everything they have got wrong in the last couple of years. Owner Ron Gordon admits now that he was too quick to sack Jack Ross early last season. He wanted to replace him with a bright young manager, overseeing a new, crowd-pleasing brand of football, but he wasn’t prepared to give Shaun Maloney, a novice, the time to make mistakes. Maloney was then dismissed before the summer, just as Stephen Glass had been in similar circumstances at Aberdeen.
The result at both clubs has been a chaotic whirlwind of players and managers coming and going, with no consistent strategy and none of the continuity that is crucial to success. Here are Hibs, bracing themselves for another overhaul, hoping upon hope that Johnson gets it right.
For now, they are standing by him. Seeking a fourth permanent manager in just over a year would look terrible for Gordon, which is perhaps why Johnson felt able to criticise the club when he let rip the other day. He spoke of mistakes that had been made, structures they needed to get right and “poor historic decisions”, most notably the failure to secure Porteous on a longer-term contract. The defender looks set to leave this month for a modest fee, with no adequate replacement in sight.
All of that said, the buck will stop with Johnson, who has not been flawless either. He has chopped and changed his personnel, his strategy, and been guilty sometimes of tactical naivety. If there are no signs of improvement against Motherwell at Fir Park on Saturday, or in three straight home games after that, he could be packing his bags at the end of the month and leaving behind another raft of new signings, possibly ill-suited to his successor.
It is a depressing prospect, one that Cadden is anxious to avoid by getting the players together, rolling up the sleeves and turning their season around. “I think we can do that. It’s not going to be easy. We can’t just say it and it’s going to happen. We’re going to get hammered, we’re going to take stick. But we’ve just got to stick our chests out and get on with it.
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“We’ve got to stick together. It’s a great club and the potential is still there to go again. This isn’t the season done. We’ve still got a chance to go and put it right,” he added.
