Calderwood jilts Hibs for his ex Hughton

By the time you read this, Hibernian manager Colin Calderwood may no longer be Hibernian manager.

Most likely he will have completed a return south to become assistant to Chris Hughton at Birmingham City, with Hibs potentially netting £400,000 in compensation.

But, even if that deal falls through, it's hard to see Calderwood staying at Easter Road. Some would accuse him of having burned his bridges with the club; at the very least, he has poured the petrol and provided the Zippo lighter for the task.

Whatever happens, it will be a long time before he manages a club again, one suspects. A former Spurs and Scotland international defender, Calderwood looked like quite the up and coming coach after winning League Two with unfashionable Northampton Town, and seemed like the perfect choice to take Nottingham Forest out of the lower league doldrums when he moved to the City Ground in May 2006. But his spell at Forest never quite lived up to the high expectations of the club and it's fans, even when his second season in charge resulted in promotion to The Championship; a lousy start to the following campaign led to his dismissal.

The Hibs job was his first managerial post since then; just a month after leaving Forest he became part of the coaching staff at Newcastle, working under Hughton, and was the logical choice to be assistant manager when Hughton took over the top job at St. James' Park. It appeared he still had hunger and ambition to succeed on his own when he left that role to move to Edinburgh last October, but it seems not; having given up an assistant's job in the Premier League for the SPL, he now wants to unceremoniously ditch his homeland for an assistant's job in The Championship. After only nine months at Hibs.

Granted, the phrase "poisoned chalice" does not quite seem to do justice to the post of Hibernian manager. In a decade since Alex McLeish left to take over at Rangers, only Tony Mowbray has enjoyed sustained success, and he was lucky enough to inherit future internationals Ian Murray, Derek Riordan, Scott Brown, Gary O'Connor, Kevin Thomson and Steven Whittaker from the club's youth setup. Mowbray's successors have each had their struggles - John Collins won the league cup but never won over the dressing room, allegedly after criticising player fitness and stripping off in order to prove he was fitter than the players (in which sense of the word, one wonders). Results declined a bit further under Mixu Paatelainen, who was shown the door after 18 months despite two top six finishes. The big Finn's subsequent spell at Kilmarnock has proven that his Easter Road experience left him far wiser, if also a bit balder. Calderwood's immediate predecessor was Paatelainen's replacement, former Hibs player and Falkirk manager John Hughes, who enjoyed an initial bounce in results which disguised more dressing room problems (recurring theme here), but things deteriorated to the point where some players supposedly just ignored orders to, for example, warm down after matches.

Curiously, Calderwood's number two was Derek Adams, who left his manager's job at Ross County to become Calderwood's number two, despite Calderwood admitting that they had never met. Ironically given current circumstances, Adams returned to his former job in Dingwall at the end of the season.

There is no doubt that the team was at a low ebb when Calderwood took over, and his abysmal start - 2 wins in his first 15 league games and a cup exit to second division Ayr United - can at least partly be blamed on the shambles he inherited. He recognised the need for a total overhaul, moving on well over a dozen first team players, and had at least some reasonable backing from the board - chairman Rod Petrie has funded the return of striker O'Connor to the club, and also provided a six figure transfer budget in January which, bizarrely was spent on Ross County midfielder Martin Scott, presumably on the recommendation of his erstwhile assistant Adams. He hadn't won over the fans yet, but he hadn't completely lost them either. But, less than two weeks before the start of the season, he appears poised to dump them.

If it doesn't work out at St. Andrews', I can't help feeling that few chairman would take a chance on offering him another manager's job. He appears willing to ditch Hibs, having not even come close to fulfilling his mandate, for a job with far less prestige and standing (but presumably a few more zeroes on the paycheque), and at the time which harms his former employer most. If he has put the word "loyal" on his CV, he should probably delete it, along with "humble" and "dedicated" as well.

It appeared impossible that Colin Calderwood could leave Hibernian in an even worse state than when he arrived. But he appears to have managed it. For when the going got tough, Calderwood didn't get going. He left.

L.