HIBERNIAN'S HORRENDOUS pre-season hasn't stopped Mixu Paatelainen working his way to the top of his profession. Bookmakers have the Finn as a short-priced favourite to be the first manager to part company with an SPL side.
All these piddly warm-up games aren't meaningless to everyone, then. And even if reputations and points are not on the line, they aren't meaningless to Paatelainen either.
How else to explain why he landed himself a two-match ban for going berser
k at officials during last week's 2-0 defeat by Cowdenbeath? Or followed up the shocking 3-0 loss to Clyde days later by raging that he wouldn't pick nine of the players involved again? That every available piece of close-season evidence suggests strongly the Leith team are monumentally lacking – they hadn't even scored a goal during their summer build-up ahead of yesterday's Middlesbrough encounter – is patently getting to Paatelainen... and an increasingly fractious Hibs support. The fans have begun to mutter darkly, and unfairly, about the possibility of Mr Blobby Mk II. (Bobby Williamson was the owner of the nasty nickname four years ago when Hibs were mired in mid-table mediocrity).
Then, Williamson's length of stay in Leith was the subject of constant speculation. Paatelainen received a taste of the same last week when an internet rumour he was about to resign from a post only held since January entered the public domain. Believed to be at his wit's end over chairman Rod Petrie's failure to push through deals for squad reinforcements, it is perhaps significant the Hibs manager declared the claim "nonsense" the very day he welcomed Joe Keenan and Steven Thicot to the club.
Paatelainen cut a relaxed figure as he did so. He was certainly far more at ease than the man club insiders maintain was indeed considering his position as he made scary sense of the messages coming from Petrie and recent matches. He even provided a neat analogy between the testing time his team have endured and cramming for tests.
"It is something you should expect," he said of recent risible results. "You are changing the way you try to pass the ball. At the same time, you have demanding training sessions. You are not as fresh or as sharp as you would be during league matches. But once you take your foot off the gas in training – in terms of intensity – and don't talk about tactics all the time, it all comes out.
"A good example is when you are studying for an exam. You swot non-stop for a couple of days. In the evening you go to bed and it's all just a big mess in your brain. You try to remember something and you can't – you panic. The next morning you wake up and you've got the exam. There's a question – bang! You answer it. That is what it is like."
In fairness to Hibs, rarely throughout the SPL campaign will they face posers of the sort with which Barcelona, Middlesbrough, Wigan, on Wednesday, and, to a lesser extent, Intertoto Cup impalers Elfborg could mash their brains as they worked towards their league opener at Kilmarnock next Saturday. Cowdenbeath and Clyde, on the other hand...
"I told the players our pre-season would not be a stroll in the park," Paatelainen said. "We gave ourselves big tests – Barcelona, the too early Intertoto games and then two Premiership opponents. The players are under pressure and I want that. That is when they think. That is when they really need to make those decisions out there, with the high tempo. And that is what it is going to be like when the SPL starts. If you play against someone and thump them 8-0 you get a false picture. You're not playing at that tempo; you're not thinking fast because it happens easy. I would like the results to be positive but they might be negative and it doesn't mean we will have a poor league opener."
It is forgotten that, when it mattered across the second half of last season, Paatelainen hauled Hibs up from eighth place to a position wherein they were challenging for third spot going into the last three matches. Yet, survey the squad and it just doesn't look like a potential 'best of the rest', as it was, for a time, under Tony Mowbray and John Collins. Paatelainen's predecessor jacked it because he became exasperated over what he was expected to deliver while unable to deviate from the Petrie policy of recruiting free transfers – other team's misfits – for a top line lower than that paid by six other SPL sides.
Where Hibs find themselves was acutely illustrated by Steve Lovell's decision to reject a move to Leith in favour of joining Falkirk, whose 6,000 average attendance is only half the Easter Road figure. Lovell could not be enticed despite appearing to fit the profile of the striker Paatelainen wants as one of two further additions to his squad.
"We need to work very hard on that front," he said. "We need to improve the strikers' department and I say that not because I am overly-worried we haven't scored goals, which perhaps hasn't happened because of the high quality of our opponents. But I want different type of strikers. I want to have an option to play a little bit different against certain defenders. We have strikers who have always scored and will always score and we have players who create loads of chances. But I think we need a quick striker, a goalscorer. Whether we'll get one or not, we'll see."
The solitary positive for Hibs in the close season can be framed in the negative. It is that Steven Fletcher hasn't gone the way of the other major assets from the club's golden generation, in the form of Garry O'Connor, Gary Caldwell, Derek Riordan, Kevin Thomson, Scott Brown and David Murphy, and accepted greater riches elsewhere. "If he goes he has to go soon because his price is coming down all the time," Paatelainen mocked. "The first time it was written he was worth £5m, then it was £4m and now it's £2m. By the end of August it will be £100,000. There is no logic in that. Normally it goes the other way. Fletcher is a fantastic player and worth more than £2m. He won't go anywhere, as far as I'm concerned."
And as far as anyone forming an objective view is concerned, Hibs are going nowhere either. They have lost a body of players capable of entertaining through conjuring up game- winning moments of brilliance. In their place, they have still-to-convince youngsters, pedestrian performers and flouncy sorts only able to produce once-in-a-while. The only course of action available to Paatelainen has been to set about turning Hibs into a grinding, prosaic unit in order to maintain results. The change threatens to put him in direct conflict with a support that demand precisely the "showboating" he lambasted his charges for only last week.
Hibs have cashed in on a squad that allowed Mowbray to make a team to be marvelled at, and Collins to capture the club's only cup in 16 years. With the financial pressures of the game, perhaps that was as much as the Easter Road side could ever do. As much as Paatelainen might be able to do now is prevent those cashing in who hold a bookies' slip with his name on it.
The full article contains 1257 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
