Bill’s ready & someone’s going to pay
Foley clearly means business as wind of change hits Easter Road
FORTY days was all it took for Bill Foley to be given the keys for a look underneath Hibs’ bonnet.
Just a little over a month since Bournemouth’s billionaire owner got the green light to throw some of his loose change towards Easter Road, his Black Knight consortium will lead a review into their football structure after a car crash of a season.
Something certainly needs to change at a club that has veered badly off track.
Suggestions director of football Brian McDermott could be moved into a more recruitment-centred role, with another DOF brought in, just reek of another layer of bureaucracy at a time when the club is crying out for a simplified, clear vision.
Nick Montgomery’s job is not under threat right now and rightly so after a series of sackings that only deepened the malaise.
But the pressure has ramped up on the Yorkshireman. The five post-split fixtures to be played out in the bottom half aren’t carrying all the appeal of a dead rubber any more.
Suddenly the focus on Montgomery has sharpened. And it’s fair to say the manager needs to improve results between now and the end of the season when he will hope to be given the all-important second transfer window.
Who takes the lead role in the summer recruitment could be vital.
Will the link-up with Foley’s consortium give Hibs an “edge”, as chief executive Ben Kensell claimed last month?
Will Montgomery get the final say on who comes in?
Does he have the backing of the new man on the board?
If anything is to be learned from Foley’s 18 months in charge of Bournemouth it’s that he doesn’t shy away from making big decisions.
Less than a year ago Gary O’Neil was fired despite leading the Cherries to a respectable 15th-place finish.
It was unpopular with many of the punters but Foley, when quizzed on the decision months later, insisted it “wasn’t a difficult one”.
Why? O’Neil didn’t play the attacking brand of football that Foley had in mind.
Yet in so many ways Hibs’ problem this season has been the opposite. An overly expansive style and an inability to do the ugly stuff.
Incredibly they’ve thrown away 22 points by conceding goals in the last 15 minutes.
The soft centre stretches back to the first game of the campaign when Hibs clawed themselves back to 2-2 against St Mirren only to chuck it away in the 89th minute.
That, of course, was on Lee Johnson’s watch before the Englishman was sacked.
In Montgomery’s first game in charge away to Kilmarnock, Hibs led 2-0 with more than an hour on the clock. Final score: 2-2. A month later, 2-0 up at home to Ross County with 16 minutes to go, again 2-2 was the outcome.
The next week, leading St Mirren 2-1 in injury-time, guess what? A 2-2 draw.
There’s more… Hearts’ last-gasp winner in the festive derby in Leith, Celtic’s 92nd-minute winner at Easter Road, Ross County with a 98th-minute equaliser in Dingwall and St Johnstone nicking all the points from Leith with a goal nine minutes from time.
Is it any wonder when the Fir Park clock ticked into the 94th minute on Saturday, with a 1-0 lead that had them in the top six of the live table, every Hibs fan in the ground would have been fearing the worst? And so it transpired. The biggest problem for the Hibees this season has been game management.
That falls on the guys in the dugout as much as the players.
You don’t need much of a review to tell you that.