Tom English: 'Aliens would look at Yogi and think the earth was inhabited by crazy people'

There are times in football when it's appropriate to defer to the alien test in an attempt to explain some of the things that go on in the game. John Hughes' plight at Hibs is a case in point.

• Green monster: John Hughes is trying to laugh off the pressure he is under, but the Hibs manager needs a couple of wins to get the critics off his back. Photograph: SNS

Imagine if the little green men dropped into his world right now. Imagine if they sat among the reporters at Hughes' press conference at Tranent last Thursday. What would they make of him and his "eye of the tiger" stuff?

How would they assess a guy who was banging on about battles and fights and, in that slightly crazed way of his, about wiping the smile off the faces of those who doubted him, who was summoning up the name of Davie Moyes and comparing his situation at Hibs with Moyes's at Everton? "You need to laugh at adversity," Yogi said. Look it in the face and give it pelters. Aye. Eight wins in 33 games in 2010. Hilarious. No wins in nine at Easter Road. Uproarious.

What would the aliens think as the Yogi show unfolded? They'd think the earth was inhabited by crazy people. They'd look at Yogi and the way he sucks the energy out of the room with his relentless chat, and they'd back away from him slowly, inching their way out of the door, on to the back fields of Tranent and into their space ship. Up, up and away from the strange man who never shuts up.

They'd be too spooked to stick around to hear his life story, which he's well-versed in telling. The daft laddie fae Leith and all that. "The best thing was Saturday mornings," he told me once, when recounting his childhood years. "My mother would be away to the wash house, pushing a pram with a big tin bucket full of dirty clothes sitting on top. We'd all be given our jobs. My three sisters, my two brothers and me. 'You wash the windows, you scrub the floor, you clean the toilet, you tidy your room'. We'd just sit in front of the telly and watch cartoons. Nothing would get done until she was on the way back, We'd be able to see her from about 300 yards away and we'd spring into action. 'Here she comes!' It was a Benny Hill job. We'd all be running after each other tidying up. By the time she got in the house the place was immaculate."

Bed-time in the Hughes household? "My brothers and me would all piss the mattress during the night; you'd need a snorkel and a pair of Speedos."

Yogi is not everybody's cup of tea. I know of those who reckon that his working class tales are a little tiresome and that his patter is better than his management. Personally, I have to declare myself a fan. I liked what he did at Falkirk. I've admired some of what he has produced at Hibs, while admittedly wincing at some of the losses his boys have served up recently. As a journalist - and I accept this has little relevance to all you suffering Hibees - I find it hard to dislike a guy who is capable of creating an image of himself and his brothers swimming in their own urine. Easy for me to say that, of course. I don't have an emotional attachment to Hibs. I don't feel a sharp pain in the gut whenever they lose. And they've been losing too often.

Clearly, there is a growing number among the Hibs support that are fed up with him and, to be fair, you can see where they're coming from. The team is underperforming. The elan of a year ago is no more. They've stalled and now look like they're going into reverse. It's perfectly legitimate to wonder whether this is a terminal decline under Hughes or a mere blip. It's still too early to make that call. The day of reckoning is not far off, but it's still premature to be writing the big man's obit.

Any assessment of Hughes has to include the good and the bad. The bad is obvious. It's all around us. The results have been woeful. They finished last season with a wretched run of nine defeats in their last dozen games and they've already lost another five, from eight, since August.

Yogi said 'behave yourself' to those who wondered about his job security last week, but it's a valid question to ask at this point. Valid in the sense that football is a bonkers game and the pressure on managers is ludicrous. The rules are unforgiving, especially in Scotland, where we always seem to want to have somebody under the cosh. Us in the media are like roaming hit-men in that regard.

At any given time of the season there's always a manager put up against the wall and told to justify his existence. It was Neil Lennon a while back, after the debacle in Utrecht. Mark McGhee has got a bit of it in recent weeks. Billy Reid got a blast before that. Now it's Yogi's turn.

What he needs is a couple of wins on the bounce and then we'll pack up our guns and move on to the next poor sap who's having a rough time. Those wins can't come quickly enough. The good in Yogi is obvious. Huge passion, masses of commitment and tangible results. You have to give him a lot of credit for getting his team into fourth spot last time around and for bringing the likes of Liam Miller and Anthony Stokes (whose loss will be severe) to the club and for developing the obvious talents of David Wotherspoon.

Only Rangers, Celtic and a widely-lauded Dundee United finished ahead of them in the SPL last season. As a manager, he deals with the bottom line all the time and the bottom line, as he sees it, is that over the course of the season only three teams were better than them. Forget the defeats on the run-in. They ended up in fourth. That is all that should matter to the fans and the memory of it should buy him some understanding. That's not the way it works, of course.

He's saying that things will come good again and the view here is that he's earned the right to get himself out of trouble. Just don't take too long, Yogi. There's only so many times you can talk about the eye of the tiger before it rears up and bites your head off. Get it sorted. The SPL needs every loveable lunatic it can lay its hands on.