Shock return to Highlands offers a shot at salvation

WI THOUT any question, the appointment of John Hughes as Ross County’s manager until the end of the season represents a considerable act of faith by the club’s longstanding chairman Roy MacGregor.

Wherever he hangs his hat, Hughes rarely does plodding along. His tenures in dug- outs tend to be either spectacular s uccesses or unmitigated disasters.

The 56-year-old has the ability to take players to places they’ve never dreamed of but, equally, he can leave them far behind.

When he puts his mind to it, as he did most notably at Falkirk and Inverness, there is a shrewd and capable football manager in there.

He took the Bairns up to the then-SPL, into a Scottish Cup final and onwards to Europe.

At Inverness, he lifted the cup in 2015, claimed third place in the top flight and also treaded the foreign boards.

His only full season at Hibs in 2009-10, which culminated in a fourth-placed finish, was also commendable.

The pattern of his coaching career suggests that i f you give the man time, he will not only deliver but produce an aesthetically pleasing brand of football into the bargain.

What makes his appointment as Stuart Kettlewell’s successor all the more intriguing is the fact that time is presently the one commodity County lack.

Ahead of tomorrow’s trip to Celtic Park, they are four points adrift at the foot of the table and haven’t won in ten league matches.

Plainly, they have a sufficient number of games to save their skins but they wouldn’t want to wait too long on getting started.

Whatever attributes Hughes boasts and whatever success he has enjoyed elsewhere, the one thing his CV does not have is a track record of digging teams out of trouble.

Hartlepool were already well on course f or League One when he moved t here in November 2012.

He won eight and drew nine from 29 matches — a reasonable return — and even won a manager of the month award. Alas, it was not enough to stave off relegation.

Having subsequently enjoyed that extraordinary success at

Inverness, his appointment at Raith Rovers in February 2017 was presented as something of a coup.

At that stage, the Kirkcaldy men were third bottom of the Championship and had gone 14 games without a win.

The situation was serious but by no means irretrievable.

What played out over the next four months, however, was to be the darkest chapter Stark’s Park has witnessed in many a long year.

It wasn’t just the fact Rovers tumbled into the third tier via a play- off defeat to Brechin City that irked all concerned.

It was that Hughes’ behaviour throughout had opened the trapdoor.

Playing a style of football that was entirely unsuited to the players at his disposal was one thing. But a belligerent, selfserving demeanour that created a chasm between him and the dressing room was a different matter.

When an evidently f ragile Rovers shipped f i ve goals without reply at St Mirren on the penultimate game of the regular season, no one expected Hughes ( below) to be praising his players’ efforts.

What he delivered to the club’s own in-house TV station postmatch, though, was a jawdropping public flaying of his players. And all while they still had an outside chance of scrambling to safety.

‘Maybe it’s time for a f ew home truths,’ he began after the heavy loss took the run under him to just three wins in 13 matches.

‘I look at society, c o mpared to whe n I wa s growing up. I was working class, had to work for everything I got.

‘It made me humble and those were my building blocks for football and for life.

‘I don’t think society’s like that now. I don’t think they care.’

Hughes had been no stranger to the ‘working class hero’ shtick elsewhere and he was indulged as long as his sides continued to punch above their weight.

But it was never going to wash with a Rovers dressing room devoid of all confidence.

It only saw a man trying to absolve himself of blame while attempting to pin it all on them.

‘He was asking players to do stuff they couldn’t do,’ recalled f ormer Raith keeper Kevin Cuthbert.

‘ If you recognise that and still ask them to do it, who’s at fault?’

The record books show that Rovers did rally to a win over Ayr in their next match but it was not enough to prevent them facing high-flying Brechin devoid of all belief and morale.

‘The players were gone. They were demoralised,’ Cuthbert recalled. ‘Yogi had gone as well.

‘His frustration had boiled over to the point where he had his public rant.

‘And whether it was right or not, in my eyes that’s the sort of thing that stays in the dressing room and you defend your players in front of the cameras.’ Hughes paid a big price for that infamous episode, too. Countless jobs he should have been considered for have come and gone in the subsequent three-and-ahalf years. But strip away his bluster, all the talk of banter and boiler suits, and there’s still potentially a good manager in there. Provided he r emembers what once made him one, his r eturn to t he Highlands could redefine him.