Things can only get better for Hibs after last season, says Lewis Stevenson

By MOIRA GORDON
Published on 05/08/2012 01:19

IT HAS been a summer spent holed up, 
licking wounds but, as of this afternoon, there is nowhere for the Hibs players to hide.

As a new campaign gets under way, Lewis Stevenson says the squad have to use the brutal disappointments of last term to drive them towards vast improvements. In the aftermath of the 5-1 Scottish Cup thrashing at the hands of capital rivals Hearts, he scarpered back to Fife, hoping to avoid the recriminations and the shame.

“I just locked myself in my room for a couple of weeks. It’s hard to take but these things happen. It was a horrible experience. I tried to stay away from Edinburgh as much as I could but you have to face it at some point.”

The midfielder was named Player of the Year by both his team-mates and the Supporters’ Association but during a season when the squad performed so poorly, he says there is little honour in that. “I think I won those two Player of the Year awards by default. I’ll probably put the season behind me even if it was OK on a personal level. You get judged by how the team does. I know I can do better and I know the team can do better.”

But after a couple of years of such statements, he accepts results are needed to back up his words.

“The manager said ‘the last game was a 
disaster, we’ve a lot of wrongs to make right’. It does act as an incentive but you also have to put it to the back of your mind,” said Stevenson. “We’ve got enough to think about with the new season. It still lingers at the back of the mind and it will hurt for a while, no matter what happens. It will probably always be there but you have to deal with it. If we get a good result against Dundee United on Sunday it sets us up well for the derby the following week. One result against them wouldn’t change much but it’s a start.”

After Hibs narrowly avoided relegation, the patience of fans is wearing thin. “You always like to aim high,” said Stevenson. “You’d like to think we could do what Dundee United and Motherwell have done [qualify for Europe] but we’ve been saying that for the last couple of years and it hasn’t happened so I don’t want to make any predictions. The top six is our priority but it would be nice to aim higher.

“We’re confident enough and we’ve had a decent pre-season. We feel, in a way, that we’ve got nothing to lose because it surely can’t be much worse than last season but we need to try and do our talking on the pitch. We need to get off to a good start and we need to get the fans back on our side. They’re not happy with us just now, which is fair enough, so we have to show how much this means to us.”