Hibs: Summer's Gloom

The commentators have fixed the month for me, they have chosen the date and the day. But I advise them: "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched."

Remember what happened to Marie Lloyd. She fixed the day and the date, and she told us what happened. As far as I remember it went like this: 'There was I, waiting at the church.'

Perhaps you recall how it went on. 'All at once he sent me round a note. Here's the very note.

This is what he wrote: "Can't get away to marry you today, my wife won't let me."'

Now let me just make clear that I have promised nobody that I shall be at the altar in October? Nobody at all.

So said Jim Callaghan at the TUC conference in 1978.

It became a defining moment of his premiership, confirmed him as the ditherer's ditherer and resulted in the electoral backlash that was the 1979 general election.

Given the farce Colin Calderwood has allowed himself to become involved in it wouldn't suprise me if he quotes Sunny Jim verbatim when he talks to the press after Hibs play East Fife this weekend.

Hibs are enduring a summer of discontent.

It's worth remembering the health Hibs were in as the summer dawned. They'd endured a miserable season in the SPL, first under the scattergun management of self confessed "fitba' man" John Hughes and then when Calderwood arrived to steady the ship.

After a poor start - it was a cup exit to Ayr United rather than a miraculous 3-0 win at Ibrox that would define his early months - Captain Calderwood did manage to bring a lilting, leaking vessel under control.

He used the January transfer window to bring in six players, carried out radical surgery on his starting eleven and ended February as manager of the month. He also put paid to any lingering - and at one stage very real - threat of relegation.

But the season didn't so much fizzle out as drop down dead of heart failure. It wouldn't be quite right to say Hibs made an almighty mess of the last weeks of the campaign. To make a mess you need to be active, here appeared to be a squad of passive wage cheats happy to let disaster wash over them.

Calderwood needed time, and I was happy to argue that at the time. He'd inherited a weak squad that was low on confidence and that featured a number of players who were coming to the end of their time at the club.

Rumours persisted that he wasn't happy in Leith - I wrote in a review of the season that this had much to do with his rather unanimated personality coming under the scrutiny of amatuer body language experts - but he spoke of his commitment, his desire to continue reshaping the squad and of a work in progress.

And then something changed. Suddenly a picture surfaced that appeared to show Calderwood meeting with new Nottingham Forest manager Steve McClaren.

It seemed McClaren wanted Calderwood back at the City Ground as his number two. Then another twist. Chris Hughton, Calderwood's boss at Newcastle, landed the Birmingham City job. And he wanted Calderwood to join him.

Never has a season of such mediocre achievement resulted in such attention.

As football fans we are used to people lying to us, telling us what we want to hear to make their own life easier in the short term even as they are plotting departures.

It points either to an admirable commitment to honesty or a symbol of just how completely not arsed he is about Hibs that Calderwood chose not to issue denials.

Rather he spoke of how much he missed his family and how he wouldn't rule out a move back down south as an assistant. Not so much fanning the flames as pouring petrol on them.

He has stated his commitment to the job in hand but the fans would surely be forgiven for feeling that is now no more than a hollow insurance.

For their part Hibs have dug their heels in. Rod Petrie, Scottish football's most taciturn 'tache, was moved to release a strongly worded statement - so strongly worded that some of it has now been redacted - that was either a decisive "hands-off" warning or a "you better have a bigger bag of swag if you're coming back" instruction.

But the impression still remains that Forest will up their offer, Petrie will bank the cash and Calderwood will be away. Hibs will have a matter of weeks to find a new manager and for that manager to get to know his squad and prepare for the season ahead.

Arriving late in the transfer window the new man - I presume it will be a man - will be working with an inherited squad. It will be yet another season of "transition" for a club that currently seem to be almost permanently suspended in transition.

The glib reaction is "well, Calderwood's crap so Hibs will be better off."

It's not a reaction I accept. What the club needs is stability - not the much vaunted financial stability - but the sort of stability that allows a manager to build a team, develop youngsters and have a real impact.

Hibs haven't had that for years. They are on their eighth manager since 2001. This is a club that has regressed since John Collins won the League Cup in 2007. Calderwood deserved time to at least prove that he'd buck that trend.

And now it seems that he doesn't want it.

If he goes then it is Calderwood who will be painted as the villain. But what it is about this club - with first class facilities - that makes it so difficult to manage in the long term?

What is it about this club that leads those in the media I speak to - all of them dealing with football clubs every day and not all of them unsympathetic to Hibs cause - to describe Easter Road as "shambolic" or an "absolute nightmare?"

What in this board's record suggests that in Rod Petrie and his henchman we have a group of men qualified to find the right man for the job? Their last four appointments have hardly been rip roaring successes.

Calderwood's departure wouldn't be an isolated one off, it's not simply a tale of a man taking on a job that was too big for him, it's part of an extended pattern of a club that has achieved much off the pitch but that fails time and time again to get it right on the pitch.

A training ground and a completed stadium are fantastic things and they are things at which Petrie has excelled. But he's now failing the club on the football side.

Even if Calderwood does stay I see nothing but problems ahead. Supporters who have had there patience sorely tried, who have never been convinced by the manager and who object to his apparent lack of commitment won't take long to turn on him.

I hear dismal stories regarding season ticket sales, I frequently encounter fans who have had an anger bypass and now function on apathy alone. That's a big, big problem for a board that has been built in Rod Petrie's image, a board that worships sound financial management before footballing success.

(Success is relative. Sometimes it feels you can't mention "Hibs board" and "lack of ambition" in the same sentence without being shouted down for your dangerous talk of a kamikaze financial policy. But what is the point in all this financial success if the club isn't willing to compete with other clubs aiming for the top half of the table? And how much more difficult does it become to sustain financial success when the product on the pitch is consistently poor?)

On the back of that abject season Hibs needed this summer to be an inspirational one. It hasn't been.

Alongside the Calderwood saga there's been a training round bust up that ended with a young player in hospital. For a club that's struggled of late to shrug off tales of indiscipline that's unfortunate.

I've heard tales of new strips being sent out without the socks due to a manufacturing problem. One story, possibly apocryphal, had tickets going on sale without the club having the paper to print them.

Small things perhaps. But part of a bigger picture, contributing to the idea of a club that is at odds with itself. A failure to reverse that impression will begin to seriously harm the club's accounts.

And a wantaway manager does nothing to help.

The club will point to the signings of Garry O'Connor and Ivan Sproule as being a statement of intent. But they've not had the galvanising affect on the fans that might have been hoped. The fans know what they once were, they need convinced that they can still provide the answers Hibs need.

And, in their own way, the signings have been destructive. If certain rumours - strong but unsubstantiated - are to be believed then Calderwood himself did not sanction these two nostalgia signings. If there is truth in that - neither player fits the profile of other Calderwood signings - then we might see that a homesick manager has been driven to despair by interference from above.

Even if those rumours are untrue, the number of people prepared to believe them illustrates the huge disconnect that currently plagues the "Hibernian family."

Most fans would also concede that those two signings plus Sean O'Hanlon represent the bare minimum of what needed to be done in this transfer window. The current lack of activity - perhaps related to the Calderwood question - is not setting minds at ease.

A depressing summer? For sure. A squad that doesn't yet feel fit for purpose - horror stories reached me from Livingston in midweek - is about to face a new SPL season with either a manager who doesn't want to be there or a manager who is as yet completely unknown.

That is a not a pre-season to get excited about. It's an absolute disaster.

Colin Calderwood has played his part in all this. But as the days between us and the new season disappear Hibs are still looking odds on to be searching out yet another new manager. Their third in less than twelve months, their ninth in a decade.

If anyone in a position of influence at Easter Road think that is a sound, sensible or successful record for a football club then it's not just Colin Calderwood who should be considering his position.

Pigs In Blankets

OK. Allegedly. Our lawyers might be watching etc etc. But Billy Davies and Tommy Sheridan. The mind is boggling.

I've not been to the newsagents. This might be a cracking Photoshop job. Or massively untrue and pulled from the Record's later editions.

But still. It's a right guid story. Allegedly.

First reactions via text: "Yuk, yuk, yuk." "Ha, ha. Even better."

Aye Gail, the people of Scotland send both of you our support.

Middlesbrough v Nottingham Forest on Boxing Day. Best of luck with the chants, Boro boys!

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Book review: Martin O'Neill - The Biography

By Simon Moss (John Blake Publishing)

It's a tricky thing, writing an unauthorised biography. How do you pitch it? Do you go for the muckraking reportage of rumour and innuendo like Kitty Kelley or Albert Goldman? Or just use existing sources to build a portrait of the subject.

In Martin O'Neill: The Biography, Simon Moss takes the latter approach in a workman-like book that ultimately fails to satisfy.

Partly this is the fault of O'Neill himself. A complex, intense character he deserves more than a life illustrated by old cuttings.

Even here though you feel Moss could have done better. O'Neill's relationship with Brian Clough obviously shaped both his playing career and his subsequent attitude to the role of manager. Moss refers to it a lot but fails to properly examine it.

Similarly the way events in Northern Ireland affected O'Neill as a young Northern Irish Catholic living in England are alluded to but not really analysed. That might be excusable in a football book but they must have played some part in shaping O'Neill and certainly influenced his relationship with Neil Lennon when he joined him at Celtic.

And brevity is not always the author's friend. I feel that a sentence like "O'Neill...may have been immune to the troubles taking place in his homeland, but Forest had their own problems on the pitch" veers towards the offensive when the year in question is 1972.

So we are left with a chronological tour through O'Neill's career. And there's nothing wrong with that, especially for Celtic fans as the Parkhead period is given the lion's share of the book.

Personally I'd have like to hear more about the playing years. I know a little about that strained relationship with Clough but I was unaware, for example, that O'Neill scored for Irish club Distillery in the Nou Camp as a teenager.

Still, that's a minor quibble in a book that is clearly geared towards those interested in O'Neill the manager - an approach that might yet have Liverpool fans snapping it up in the weeks ahead.

Less easy to overlook are the errors that litter the pages. The Manchester United of one sentence become the Untied of the next. It becomes laughable when "former O'Neill charge Emily Heskey" gets what must surely have been a memorable equaliser. It is perhaps unfair to judge Moss' work on the failings of his editor - Lord knows this blog is not without errors - but when "Nemanja Vidi?" is making an appearance on the second last page this reader's patience was sorely tried.

An editor with a knowledge of Scottish football would probably have also realised that Celtic were unlikely to be playing "Livingstone" (Doctor, I presume). Similarly The Herald is suddenly transformed into Sydney's Morning Herald.

There are numerous examples of this: O'Neill is quoted as saying that John Clark told him the Celtic team of 1976 never got booed. Why Clark would pick a season five years after he left Celtic is unclear. Unless, of course, he was talking about 1967. A big mistake that as far as Celtic are concerned.

When, on page 213, "O'Nell was forced to blood nineteen-year-old David Youngster" in goals at the Nou Camp, these errors had me snorting my tea. Still, for a marshall, Youngster did very well.

And that's all a shame, because the book deserves better. It's not a classic, it's not the definitive O'Neill story, but it's a worthwhile look at a man who has been involved in senior British football for almost forty years.

It's certainly readable - I particularly enjoyed having my memory jogged about Celtic's run to the UEFA Cup final - and remains so despite some of the more glaring errors.

But you can't help picture O'Neill's demented leaping at so many missed opportunities if Moss was playing for one of his teams. In the end this book leaves you wanting more. For that we might have to wait for Martin O'Neill: The Autobiography.

If he can ever sit down long enough to write it.

You can buy Martin O'Neill: The Biography and loads of other stuff at The Scottish Football Bookshop. Mercy me, I need the cash.

Stewart stews

The list of the types of people that annoy me is quite long. But people who are needlessly aggressive, the kind of person that always seems a step away from unfathomable anger, is near the top.

You'll see them all the time. They walk around town aggressively, looking for something to get annoyed with, a statue to have an argument with. They're in pubs and you probably sit next to them at the cinema.

And you meet them at the football. For some reason football grounds attract them, it's like a weekly convention of the needlessly pissed off.

I find myself wanting to say "calm down, get over it, smile."

Psychologists would no doubt explain the underlying reasons for the unhappiness that manifests itself as this anger at the whole world. I tend to just think: "Grow up, twat." Which, on reflection, might make me as bad as them.

Anyway the reason I relate this meandering internal monologue is that it immediately sprang to mind when I heard the news that Michael Stewart was set to leave Hearts.

I don't know the exact details of what forced Stewart to walk away from his boyhood club for a second time. But for some reason he was stripped of the club captaincy and Jim Jefferies felt the need to freeze out his top scorer for the last few games of the season.

All the stranger when you consider that it was Stewart's crucial goals that won Hearts enough points to make the top six and the semi final of the League Cup.

But all this is just following the pattern of his career. From the fisticuffs in the dressing room at Nottingham Forest through the run-ins with John Collins at Easter Road to the latest departure from Hearts. Find a good thing then self destruct seems to be the Stewart way.

And that's before we look at his disciplinary record.

He's the angry young man stomping about town let loose on the training pitch, the inexplicably irate supporter transferred from the terrace to the field.

You get the impression that left alone in an empty room he would find a way of sparking World War 3.

And that temperament has undoubtedly damaged his career. Since 1998 he has played only 179 senior games for five different clubs.

He was perhaps never going to live up the potential that saw him sign for Manchester United as a teenager but he has shown, albeit far too briefly, that he could be an influential and admired player in the SPL.

Maybe the experience of coming so close to superstardom at Old Trafford soured him. I don't know and that's all getting a bit too close to amateur psychology for my liking. Whatever the reasons he too often gives the impression of being unable to control a temper that has done real damage to his career.

By all accounts he is an intelligent guy who can speak knowledgeably and with real passion about the game. Refreshingly he doesn't have an agent and deals with that side of things himself (we can but guess how that went down with Mr Romanov).

Yet for some reason there is something that causes him to seek out trouble. On the pitch, with his own players, his managers, his chairmen. He is capable of displaying a snarling hatred of them all.

It now looks like he is going to continue his career with Turkish side Genclerbirligi. It will be interesting to see how he fares in some of Turkey's more tempestuous stadiums.

I wish him good luck but I fear a career is being wasted. Sadly that's robbed us of a player who could rise above the mediocre average of the SPL.

But it's most damaging for Michael Stewart himself. A footballer is a long time retired. And when it's all over there is nobody to get angry with but yourself.

Don't rate Stewart? You need technique and skill to score a goal like this:

Book review: Cloughie - Walking On Water

Cloughie: Walking On Water is billed as being the life story of one of football most extraordinary managers. That story has, of course, been told elsewhere by both Clough himself and others in fact and in fiction.

Walking on Water retreads some of this ground – the phenomenal goalscoring record at both Middlesbrough and Sunderland, the anguish of a career cut short, the sheer joy of seeing a football philosophy capture imaginations and hearts at Derby and Forest, the bitterness of rejection by England as a player and manager – but also provides Cloughie's final verdict on football at large.

Unsurprisingly he's unimpressed with a lot of what sees. Arsenal are compared to the Leeds United of his nightmares although by the end of their unbeaten run (a stretch which knocked Clough's Forest out of the record books) he has been converted and calling for a statue of Arsene Wenger to be erected outside the FA as a reminder to all of how football should be played.

Recent events give the pages dealing with Sir Bobby Robson and added poignancy and Clough's old spark and nous are evident in his summary of the way Freddie Shepherd mismanaged Newcastle. But his affection for Sir Bobby completely contradicts Robson's recollection of a meeting between the two early in their management careers.

Robson's anecdote (basically Clough telling him to "fuck off") nudges you to the conclusion that Clough, so vehemently opposed to indiscipline off the pitch, could be narky, ill tempered and vengeful off it.

That conclusion is borne out by the break up with his old partner Peter Taylor. Clough, in his twilight years, is full of the regret of age over how he allowed the feud to go on until it was too late.

The Taylor episode is one of a few mistakes Clough will admit to. Leaving Derby in a fit of pique, taking the Leeds job to prove a point, staying too long at Forest and, most tragically of all, not realising how in thrall he was to alcohol until it was too late.

Writing this late in his life Clough remains astute about many of the big issues facing football. His chapters on what makes a great manager are compelling, his dismissal of today's TV commentators and pundits are completely on the nose.

It's intriguing to imagine how Brian Clough would have fared in the modern game. He admits to being unable to handle the problems Justin Fashanu brought to Nottingham but would he have learned enough to adapt like a Ferguson or Robson?

Poor health brought on by his drinking meant his career was short but by then he was already past his prime. Would he have quickly become an anachronism in the brave new world of the Premiership?

We'll never know but as an insight into the philosophy and approach of unique manager Walking On Water more than passes the test.

A small stylistic point. John Sadler, acting here as ghostwriter, was a friend of Clough's and he's made a fair stab at capturing the Cloughie rhetoric on the page. Unfortunately it begins to jar quite quickly.

Like Mohammed Ali's poetry, with Brian Clough the delivery was everything. It can look hollow and self indulgent when written down.

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Sir Alex is more than United

When pundits hand out plaudits they can't help but buy into the great game of comparisons.

So Sir Alex Ferguson must be measured against Brian Clough, Bob Paisley, Matt Busby et al. They point to his singular European triumph as evidence that Paisley and Clough surpassed him, they point to his attitude as evidence that "gentleman" Sir Matt was somehow the bigger man.

But for the pundits down south football ends north of Newcastle (many of them would prefer it football stopped north of the trophyless citadel that is the Emirates and Wenger's Bash Street Kids) they rarely take into account what Ferguson did with Aberdeen.

Breaking the Old Firm stranglehold of the game, coming close in the European Cup and winning the Cup Winners Cup meant before he even travelled to Old Trafford Ferguson had already achieved greatness. With Aberdeen Ferguson had already "done a Clough" - although arguably Ferguson's successful run at the Dons was more sustained than Clough's at Forest - with a provincial side.

The achievements at Old Trafford - a bigger club than Clough ever succeeded at - surpass Busby. Which leaves only Bob Paisley and his three European Cups. For my money Ferguson's continued dominance domestically put him at the very least on a par with Paisley.

But when you take the achievements at Aberdeen and United together Ferguson's 10th Premiership is simply further proof that Sir Alex is the best of the best.