The family comes first for Easter Road boss

FANS may rather have opted to punish the Hibernian players for their unwanted treble by flogging them on the training pitch, but life has taught Alan Stubbs to put that trio of costly defeats firmly in context.

The Easter Road players were given two days off in the wake of Tuesday’s loss to Queen of the South, a result that, in the wake of defeats to Morton and Dumbarton, effectively handed Rangers the Championship trophy they already had one hand on.

The break allowed Stubbs and his staff the chance for introspection, to seek answers to the ‘blip’ that, ahead of this afternoon’s Scottish Cup quarter-final with Inverness Caledonian Thistle and next Sunday’s League Cup Final against Ross County, is in danger of leaving a promising-looking campaign in tatters.

However, the Hibs head coach instead sought the comfort of his family. Perspective is all too often difficult to find in the fraught setting of football but Stubbs confesses that two battles with testicular cancer have shown him how to cope with any sporting setbacks he encounters.

‘I’m raring to go again,’ he said. ‘I just chilled, tried not to look at football. I went for a game of golf, went for dinner with the family, went for lunch with my daughter because she couldn’t make the dinner — I’ve just done things like that.

‘Whenever I have the chance, I do these things because football is not the life and soul to me. It’s a big part of my life, but it’s not 100 per cent my life and it never will be.

‘With what’s happened to me in my life, it’s not the be all and end all. I love it but it’ll never be football first and family second with me.

‘It’s amazing what it takes to get to that realisation but that’s the bubble we live in.

‘You can lose track of the most important values you have, which is why it’s been good for me the last couple of days. We’re all human, we need that release because it’s a job that’s full on.’