Hibs raring to go, says Calderwood

Colin Calderwood today insisted his Hibs stars are "raring to go" after being frozen out of action for almost three weeks.

The Easter Road outfit have their fingers crossed the promise of another Arctic blast towards the end of this week won't hit their trip to face former boss Mixu Paatelainen's Kilmarnock on Saturday after seeing games against St Mirren and Hamilton postponed.

Saints visit to Edinburgh was cancelled along with the remainder of the SPL programme due to fears over fans' safety as they travelled, while Hibs' trip to New Douglas Park was hit as Accies battled to remove some 3500 tonnes of snow from their pitch.

Those cancellations have left Calderwood's players frustrated, their last match a disappointing no-scoring draw with St Johnstone in the Capital and a performance for which they are desperate to make amends.

Killie, of course, find themselves in exactly the same position with their fixtures against Motherwell and Celtic called off as they seek to build on a decent run of form which has lifted them into the SPL's top six.

Under the circumstances Calderwood today admitted it was probably better Hibs were facing a side which has experienced exactly the same frustrations as his players than a team which had managed to play at least once over the past few weeks.

The Hibs boss claimed it would be "interesting" to see how the teams react to the enforced lay-off, his players having countered the lack of action with a couple of bounce matches on the Easter Road pitch.

Calderwood was planning a similar exercise today, having seen his players confined to working indoors for much of last week with a number of them having been unable to travel to the training centre at East Mains because of the atrocious weather.

He said: "Ideally you want to play but in reality there wasn't much hope of that happening. It will be interesting to see how everything pans out but it has been frustrating with, as it turns out, three weeks between matches. But we managed another bounce match at Easter Road on Friday, we gave each of the boys 45 minutes and we're planning another one today."

Meanwhile, the SPL have announced the postponed game against Hamilton will now go ahead at New Douglas Park a week tomorrow, at 7.45pm.