Pressure grows on John Hughes to salvage season for Hibs after Dingwall debacle

WHEN a football club suffers a run of two or three poor results, the manager thinks about changing the team. When the run persists, the supporters start to think about changing the manager.

So far only a small minority of Hibernian fans have suggested John Hughes should carry the can for their club's current sorry sequence of one win from nine games, but there is little doubt that over the coming weeks the manager will face the greatest scrutiny of his career. Having consistently accepted that he should in no way be exempt from criticism, Hughes will be prepared for the vituperation which is beginning to be directed his way. The question is whether he will be able to snuff it out by turning his team's performances around.

That will be no small feat after the debacle of Dingwall, where Hibs lost to Ross County on Tuesday night. Having already fallen to fifth in the SPL after a spell in which they were challenging for second, they went out of the Active Nation Scottish Cup at the quarter-final stage despite the most favourable draw over the competition as a whole that anyone could remember.

Hughes needs to salvage something from the wreckage of his club's season, preferably beginning on Saturday, when he takes his team to Falkirk. So far, however, he has shown little sign of knowing how to do so, other than opining that a scrappy win somewhere might be all that it takes to stop the rot.

That could be the case in the short term, but Hibs fans will rightly expect a more calculated and coherent strategy from their manager over the coming months. Hughes has so far shown himself to be a good gaffer for good times; a boss who can inculcate a feelgood mood in a group of players once things have started to go right for them. He has yet to show he has what it takes to be a successful manager in bad times.

To an extent, he and his team have been victims of their own earlier success. He knew he was taking the risk of raising expectations too high when he made the public statement that third place was the club's target, even if at the time, with Hibs within touching distance of Celtic, that target appeared modest.

Nor should it be forgotten that they are still comfortably inside the top six and in contention for a European place in his first season in charge. Right now, though, Hughes' situation is uncomfortably similar to the perilous position in which he found himself this time last year with Falkirk, who only won their fight against relegation on the final day.

Then as now there were occasions when Hughes appeared to be at the end of his tether. A year ago he found an outlet for his frustrations by lambasting certain Falkirk supporters who had called for him to be sacked; in recent weeks he has become irritated by journalists who have asked pertinent questions about his team's performances.

He has claimed to have been "exasperated" by those sceptical questions, but the real cause of the exasperation is obvious. It is the failure of his players to justify the faith he has shown in them.

Knowing that their confidence is very fragile at present, he has refrained from slaughtering those players in public. The furthest he has gone in recent days is to suggest that if his current squad cannot show enough strength of character to deal with their plight, he might need to buy in one or two players with that quality.

"Are you scared of success?" he said on Monday, explaining the kind of questions which his players would have to answer on the park. "Are you scared of failure? How do you handle it?"

He got his answer the following night. Badly.

And the trouble for the manager is that such an answer also reflects badly on him. Several members of the team who performed so abjectly at Victoria Park were recruited by him. Should he now admit that they are not good enough, or does he still think he can help them recover?

When they are playing anywhere close to their best, players such as Liam Miller and Anthony Stokes are of course good enough, and for much of the season they have been close to their best. Those two and others have such ability that it does not require a genius to achieve good results with them in the team: not, at least, when they are playing well.

Again, though, it has to be asked whether tactically as well as in how he deals with morale, Hughes is a manager for good times. You do not need a convoluted strategy if Miller is bossing the midfield and Stokes is banging in the goals. You just let them go out and play, knowing that in the likes of David Wotherspoon and Sol Bamba they have a decent supporting cast.

But what do you do when they go off the boil? How do you grind out those scrappy wins that Hibs could do with now? If Hughes has a Plan B to replace the off-the-cuff creative stuff which worked so well in the autumn, he has yet to reveal it.

Instead, in last week's Edinburgh derby we had the curious sight of this supposedly fine footballing side being reduced to chasing massive hoofed clearances from goalkeeper Graham Stack. "It's just like watching Brazil," the Hearts supporters sang ironically as they delighted in their rivals' discomfiture.

Another failing is the use of substitutions. For example on Tuesday night, with Colin Nish being caught offside several times against a defence which was pressing close to the halfway line, the game was crying out for Danny Galbraith to come off the bench.

Galbraith has already shown this season that he has the pace to cause real problems on the counter-attack with runs from further back. He could have at least forced Ross County to become more cautious, and if he had come on when the score was 1-0 to Hibs his intervention might have proved crucial. Instead, he got six minutes, which were at least four more than were given to his fellow-substitute Abdessalam Benjelloun.

Hughes' awareness of his limitations was one of his strengths as a player. Dealing with his limitations as a manager is so far proving to be an altogether tougher task.