Hinchliffe puts his best foot forward as he embarks

PFA EXIT TRIALS Former St Mirren keeper says life of a specialist coach can be frustrating one. By Stewart Fisher

IT takes lots of hard work – and a little bit of luck along the way – to reinvent yourself as a specialist position coach in football these days. Craig Hinchcliffe’s old St Mirren team-mate Allan Russell might have had the knack to successfully transform himself into the world’s best striking guru, earning himself a gig on Soccer AM and a high-profile booking from the English FA, but he is perhaps the exception which proves the rule.

Hinchcliffe, a doughty custodian who was part of Jackie McNamara’s successful staff at Partick Thistle, Dundee United and York City, knows goalkeeping coaches are as important as they have ever been in these days of so-called sweeper keepers.

One example of this is the patient way in which Stevie Woods has made distribution such a focus of Craig Gordon’s game at Parkhead this season but there are only so many clubs to go round and these specialist operators tend to come as part of the package these days.

It says it all about the vagaries of the position that Pedro Caixinha, a former goalkeeper himself, can think nothing of dispensing with the services of the venerable Jim Stewart and installing Jose Belman to implement his own ideas.

“It’s so important for a keeper to be able to create now, to start things or break things up if the ball runs through,” said Hinchcliffe, part of the technical team at the PFA Scotland exit trials at Broadwood yesterday.

“But I don’t like hearing that you need to be an outfield player with gloves. I’d like to think you’re still a goalkeeper, first and foremost, who can play with the ball. Sometimes there’s so much buzz about playing the ball that the goalkeeping aspect is lost a bit. The fundamentals of goalkeeping still have to be there.

“The goalkeeping coach role has evolved over the last 10 years. Before, we’d be stuck in a corner getting balls battered at us! But it’s become very technical.

“I’m just finishing my A Licence just now under Jim Stewart and Paul Mathers and it’s now about integrating with the coaching staff as a unit, rather than just being involved with the goalkeepers.

“So you have to be comfortable with coaching the defence as a unit or talking to midfielders about runs. At first when I started to do the outfield stuff it was a bit daunting. But

It is always hard. You go away for a couple of years and people either forget about you or assume that you’re still working down south