Hibs 0 - 0 St Mirren: Hibs move a point closer to safety

THEY have been tentative steps rather than a great leap forward, but Pat Fenlon is making progress with Hibernian.

While the defensive aberrations that used to plague them every week haven’t quite been consigned to history, they are now outnumbered by days when there seems to light at the end of their long dark tunnel.

In the SPL relegation debate, the weight of evidence is tipping in Hibs’ favour. For every match in which their bad habits return – witness those against Motherwell and Celtic – there is now another in which they produce a clean sheet, such as against Aberdeen, Kilmarnock and, at Easter Road on Saturday, St Mirren.

Better still for the long-suffering Hibs fans, the team are starting to believe in themselves. A scoreless draw with Danny Lennon’s side is not exactly a cause for celebration, but as the game entered its final throes, the question was not so much whether Hibs would throw away the point as whether they would go on to claim all three.

That has to go down as an improvement. Hibs were comfortably the better team on Saturday, with all of the best chances, and would have seen off their opponents – who have drawn 0-0 in four of their last five league games – had it not been for a string of impressive saves by Craig Samson, the St Mirren goalkeeper.

The best of those came when he blocked a powerful header by James McPake, who then missed the target from a similar position later in the first half. Samson also denied Roy O’Donovan from point-blank range after Leigh Griffiths’ shot, on the rebound from a free kick, had bounced over the defensive wall. With 15 minutes left, Griffiths was also thwarted by the St Mirren goalkeeper, who then tipped David Wotherspoon’s shot round the post after the ball had run loose.

On the face of it, Hibs should have been disappointed with a draw, but they have been through so much this season, and left themselves in such a predicament, that a point, and a decent performance into the bargain, is not to be sniffed at. After all, it takes them four points clear of bottom-placed Dunfermline Athletic and with a game in hand. A new mood is taking root as the club prepare for a Scottish Cup quarter-final tie against First Division Ayr United on Saturday, and an Edinburgh derby the following weekend. “I think now, we are going into games, expecting to win,” says McPake. “There is a confidence that we can beat teams whereas maybe before we lacked that because of the defeats and the mistakes. We have got together as a unit and we are changing that. The manager has brought in a lot of players so that helps. It gets everybody on their toes. And I just think that a couple of results and performances have changed everything. There seems to be a bit about us in that we are threatening going forward and we’re also defending better.”

McPake, of course, has had a lot to do with that, taking over as captain, despite being only a loan signing from Coventry City. Just as Hibs threaten to get back on the straight and narrow, so is the former Livingston player starting to put behind him a nightmare of his own.

McPake, 27, suffered a serious back injury midway through last season, which he has struggled to recover from. He says that some have him marked down as a problematic, injury-prone Scot who will never quite fulfil his potential. This is a reputation he hopes to change during his time at Hibs and dvd recordings of his performances are sent to Coventry every week. “Especially down south, there’s a lot of doubters, a lot of people who think, maybe rightly, that I’m injury prone, but that’s my sixth game now, and I’m feeling good. It’s games I’ve been needing. I was out for a while, but hopefully I’m proving the doubters wrong.

“Coming up here, my first aim was to help Hibernian, but it was also to prove to people that I can get my career back on track. When you miss a lot of games in a season, if you get a couple of injuries, people say ‘is he injury-prone, is he this, is he that?’ Hopefully, there will be no more injuries and I can play till the end of the season.”

McPake will not be drawn on what he plans to do after that, but however short his relationship with Hibs may be, the signs are that they can be as good for him as he can be for them.