McGinn makes a pitch for the higher ground at Easter Road
PANNED as pathetic one day. Talked up as second only to Celtic the next. Hibernian’s players have been digesting mixed messages from Neil Lennon since securing promotion and losing their Scottish Cup crown. John McGinn diplomatically and tentatively claims Hibs could land somewhere in the middle of those extremes in their first season back in the Premiership since 2013/14. However, he believes it was the very performance that prompted Lennon’s lacerating verdict on his charges last Saturday at Hampden against Aberdeen that fuels hope Hibs will be nearer the top flight high rank than on the receiving end of more stick.
McGinn said: ‘I think everyone knows it wasn’t a pathetic performance. I think what the manager was meaning was the goals weren’t great. We all knew that I made the mistake from kick-off, Darren (McGregor) the same and then me and Marv (Bartley) could have done better for the third goal.
‘We are professionals, we know when we make mistakes like everyone else. But for everyone to write us off before the game against a really good side, to then go two behind to them and to show immense character to come back and make a right good game of it shows we are not pushovers. After the game, the boys were gutted. I felt we deserved a lot more credit than we got.
‘You know what you’re getting with the current manager. He’s a winner and he doesn’t expect anything less from the players. You can play the best game of your life but lose 1-0 and you’re hopeless! Or you could scrape a 1-0 win and he’s delighted. So that’s a side of the game that we’re all learning. It’s good for me at this stage of my career to work under such a top-class manager. That can only benefit me.
‘We will find out next season where we are. Teams will enjoy coming back to Easter Road again looking to prove a point. But we could use that to our advantage. We’ll have big crowds. We should have the confidence to go and play Premiership opposition because we’ve proven in Cups that we can more than hold our own against really good top-flight sides.
‘But you need to back it up. There’s that added pressure to show that we are a good side and that we can’t just turn it on for the cup games.
‘The consistency we’ve lacked this season is something we’ve got to improve on.
‘We were lucky this season that, when we did slip up, nobody really pounced on us. Whereas if you do that in the top flight it can be a lot more costly. We’ve got an extended break to go and recharge the batteries and we’ll all be raring to go.’
McGinn has top-scoring team-mate Jason Cummings, Ross Forbes from Morton and Queen of the South’s Stephen Dobbie as rivals for this season’s PFA Scotland Championship Player of the Year award — his second successive nomination as a Hibs player.
Win or lose, the 22-year-old will conduct a thorough examination of his campaign in the company of his agent and family during which career plans will be discussed. McGinn, who has two years left on his Hibs deal, stressed the annual review and talks about his future do not signal an exit strategy from Easter Road.
‘I’ll still have the same conversation that I have at the end of every season,’ he said. ‘We’ll discuss how the season went, how things are going in general, talk about what’s best for me. But I’m still under contract for the next two seasons so, unless someone tells me otherwise, I’ll be a Hibs player.
‘I do have ambitions at some point down the line to challenge myself at a higher level. I think that’s only natural. But, like the move to Hibs in the first place, it would have to be the right one for me. I won’t jump two-footed into something without thinking about it.
‘Hibs has been great for me and I realise how much I’m still developing as a player. If I did happen to go anywhere, either now or in a few years down the line, it would have to be somewhere where I could go and improve.’
I felt we deserved a lot more credit than we got