ROSS LOOKED THE PART... BUT THERE’S NO WAY OF DRESSING UP HIBS’ WOEFUL LEAGUE FORM

He arrived at Easter Road as the height of football fashion only to fall out of style

SUAVE, sophisticated, articulate and intelligent, Jack Ross represents every forward-thinking club’s identikit of a modern manager. Yet the seemingly perfect partnership with Hibs still didn’t work out the way anyone would have imagined. And culpability for that cannot be laid at the door of just one man.

Ross leaves behind a Hibs squad genuinely shell-shocked by his departure — and blaming themselves for letting down a good gaffer who supported them through thick and thin.

Whatever whispers you might hear, Ross certainly doesn’t appear to have ‘lost the dressing room’.

In fact, even as majority shareholder Ron Gordon was deciding to swing the axe following Wednesday night’s woeful away loss to Livingston, midfielder Joe Newell was delivering an impassioned defence of the head coach.

Every single Hibs player was aware, of course, that their performances had raised questions about the manager’s position. They’d heard the angry voices among the travelling support at the Tony Macaroni Arena.

Yet Newell stressed: ‘I have been in changing rooms where you’re on a bad run and the lads are kind of whispering to each other, saying: “You know what, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the gaffer went now…”

‘But there is not one player in there who wants this manager to leave or who wants the coaches to leave.

‘This is completely on us as players. The gaffer is the manager of the club and that is the way football works, he knows that, we all know that.

‘And that is why we all feel sick — because we know that we are letting him down massively.

‘It is up to us, as men, to get a grip of ourselves and we haven’t done it. In truth, we haven’t done it for the last few weeks.’

That collective inability to perform to anything like an acceptable standard, picking up just four points from their last nine league games, was undoubtedly the main contributing factor in Gordon’s decision to act.

Gradually and then suddenly. That’s the great Hemingway line about the two ways everyone goes bankrupt. And it also applies to the decline and fall of most football managers.

Because, yes, Hibs may have beaten Rangers — led by a B-team coach on the big day — in a Hampden semi-final less than three weeks ago.

But the league form has been disastrous. And then came Wednesday night. A rank rotten effort that included two red cards, a missed penalty and a general lack of cohesion.

Ross recognised it as such, calling out the performance and accepting full responsibility for the shortcomings of his players. Because they were ‘his’ players.

So, on the basis of results alone, Hibs were justified in at least considering the manager’s position. Especially just over a week out from that Premier Sports Cup final against Celtic.

But it’s also pretty obvious that Ross (right) already had one strike against his name even before a couple of bad months brought him down.

In publicly, if politely, calling out his superiors for their failings in the transfer market, the head coach broke one of the golden rules of football.

Never slag off the boss, Jack. They tend to remember these things, when times get tough. It hardly matters that Ross was absolutely bang on the money in pointing out the obvious. Namely, that Hibernian’s failure to address glaring and desperate shortages in key positions left the head coach able only to tinker around the fringes of his team. When they started losing, he couldn’t simply drop the four or five guys whose form had fallen off the edge of a cliff. Who would he have put in their place? Go on, look through the bench, the first-team squad, the development squad. Name the go-to guys. Newell dropped in an interesting aside as he spoke about the crammed schedule — they’re not even halfway through their eight-game

December card — taking its toll on players.

‘We haven’t got a big squad; we just haven’t,’ he said. ‘And that is kind of the unspoken thing regarding the summer dealings, but we haven’t got the squads of other teams in the league to rely on.’

The ‘unspoken thing’, indeed. The elephant in the room that nobody at Hibs likes to talk about.

Axed sporting director Graeme Mathie may have carried the can for farcical deadline-day failings that left Hibs without the centreforward and centre-half deemed absolute necessities by everyone in the football department.

But his departure did a lot of heavy lifting for the entire club’s lack of foresight, planning and crisis management.

And so we ended up with the tired, burnt-out, mentally and physically soft sort of performance that allowed Livingston to not only out-compete but out-play Hibs. For the men on the pitch, players listening to away fans chant about Ross getting sacked in the morning, it was torture.

‘Yep,’ said Newell, when asked if he’d heard the singing. ‘And I don’t know when specifically it was — but just say it started after I passed the ball off the pitch, and that’s when they started booing and singing that the gaffer is “getting sacked in the morning”.

‘The fact is the gaffer hasn’t just passed the ball off the pitch, so it is on us players.

‘The coaches and the gaffer can’t call a timeout half way through the first half and get everyone in and regroup just because we have conceded a goal. It is on us as men and professional footballers to get a grip of ourselves — and we didn’t do that, we just completely went. We just went under.’

That honest admission, as much as anything, hints at the problems within a squad running on empty.

They’ve got two tricky Premiership games to squeeze in — they’re all tricky in the current circumstances — before facing Celtic at Hampden. Then, between

December 22 and January 3, their fixture list goes Aberdeen (H), Dundee United (A), Celtic (A), Hearts (H).

That traditional New Year clash already looms large on the horizon. The comparative success being enjoyed by Robbie Neilson’s men not only put pressure on Ross — it also makes them formidable first footers, regardless of who Hibs appoint between now and derby day.

While David Gray serves as interim boss, ‘executive chairman’ Gordon — who inherited Ross along with the rest of the club when he bought out Sir Tom Farmer in the summer of 2019 — now has the chance to put his own man at the helm.

It’s the first real test faced by any new owner. One that plenty have bungled over the years.

No pressure, then. Just as long as Gordon remembers that even the ideal candidate, a guy who ticks every single box and says all the right things, can’t get it right without proper support from above.