Hughes is losing Raith dressing room and letting his kitman take the team talk...
In the one breath, John Hughes is talking about his refusal to play nursemaid to a team of professional footballers disparagingly compared to a gaggle of whimpering infants.
In almost the next, he is explaining how he has every faith in a squad he’s torn down, down and further down during his brief, horrific, near-apocalyptic spell as Raith Rovers manager.
He always was prone to contradictory statements, was ‘Yogi’ — a man whose playing days are remembered as much for streaking in front of television cameras as any great contribution on the pitch.
Well, failure in Fife has exposed him as an emperor of the bucknaked variety. And laid bare his stream-of-consciousness ramblings to widespread ridicule.
The former Falkirk, Hibernian and Inverness Caley Thistle boss will bow out of Stark’s Park either tomorrow or, if recent trends continue, following play-offs to avoid a drop into the third tier of Scottish football.
Either way, Hughes will not be long remembered or sorely missed by many in Kirkcaldy. Least of all among the first-team squad.
If history suggests he’ll find another club willing to buy into his logic, meanwhile, getting even less out of these players than axed predecessor Gary Locke managed hardly looks good.
When he was nursing a burgeoning reputation as some great, up-and-coming coaching guru, Hughes could get away with plenty.
All the white noise that came as part of the package, the couthy one-liners about character, passed for colourful exuberance when he was guiding Inverness to Scottish Cup glory less than two years ago.
Results change everything, however. Which is why his instantly-viral raving rant on Raith TV following last weekend’s miserable 5-0 loss to St Mirren struck such a jarring note to many.
With his demands for players to ‘put heads in where the studs are flying’ and the inevitable anecdote about the good old days when he was just a lad, Hughes looked like a relic from a less enlightened age.
Yet he’s not for massaging the message, despite the very real threat of relegation to League One looming ahead of tomorrow’s visit of bottom side Ayr United.
‘I’m not going to go back on anything I have said,’ declared Hughes. ‘Just go and win. They have an opportunity on Saturday to go and win a football match and make everybody happy.
‘If you can’t handle that, if your mentality is not strong enough to be at your best and put in a man-of-the-match performance, if you have any nagging doubt or feel anything negative, don’t put the strip on.
‘I can’t take them by the hand. I can’t change their diapers.
‘They have to stand up, look each other in the eye and trust each other.
‘Team talks don’t matter, it’s up to these guys when they go over the white line to get together, to say: “Let’s put this right”. We’ll soon see.
‘My team talk is an easy one for Saturday. My kit man is a Raith Rovers supporter born and bred.
‘He was working on the railway before he came here — and he hated it. He’s doing the team talk on Saturday.
‘All he needs to say is: “If we don’t win today boys, every chance I might be back on the railway”. Simple. ‘If you don’t want to go and play for him, don’t pull on the strip.’ Even in the world of football, where vacuous filler often takes the place of proper analysis, Hughes can make your ears bleed with the banality of his patter. Hammering players for a lack of moral fibre, much like hiding behind ‘principles’ on how the game should be played, is effectively ducking responsibility for results. The Raith manager might as well turn up at tomorrow’s game wearing a T-shirt declaring: ‘Don’t Blame Me — I Just Work Here’. The situation is serious for Rovers, of course, with only a victory — allied to St Mirren losing away to champions Hibs — guaranteeing their Championship status for another year.
The Buddies taking even a point from their trip to the Easter Road title party, however, would mean Raith facing a relegation play-off.
That is assuming, of course, that they do not suffer a second successive 5-0 thumping — which would relegate them in an instant, at the expense of Ayr.
Locke has taken the stick for most of the failings exposed this season and, in truth, sending forward Lewis Vaughan on loan to Dumbarton in order to make room for ex-Hearts veteran Ryan Stevenson was probably a sacking offence in itself.
But Raith were eighth in the Championship when Hughes took over, with 25 points from 22 games — four clear of Ayr and a whopping 14 ahead of St Mirren.
Under his guidance, they have gained only 11 points in 13 matches.
The only comfort Rovers fans may take, heading into a match sure to shred nerves, is that their team have put together a run of five unbeaten home games under new management.
If Stark’s Park is hardly a fortress, they have to be favourites to at least avoid the ignominy of losing to Ayr.
Hughes, having verbally torn his players limb from limb with his accusations of back chat and self-delusion less than a week ago, claimed yesterday: ‘I have every trust in them.
‘If we are at it and we play like we can at home, then we’ll go and win the game. But we can’t let (the occasion) affect us.
‘It’s about character. Our character cannot be in question on Saturday.
‘It might be in question in terms of ability and I accept that.
‘But our character cannot be in question. Whatever it takes to go and win the match.’
On the day when he took over, February 10, Hughes promised: ‘I’m confident I can make a telling, positive impact at the football club before the end of this season.’
He’s certainly made an impact. And cracked a few pithy jokes along the way.