Given that Terry Butcher abandoned Inverness Caley Thistle in November to take the Hibs job, you won't raise an eyebrow on learning that I'm experiencing a wee bit of schadenfreude just now.
You might, however, be a bit surprised that I'm going to defend him. Just a little bit.
It's not easy to do so. Hibs are totally within their rights to chuck him. After all, he's accomplished what we all thought impossible - he managed to make Pat Fenlon's team even worse. They won only two of their last twenty-one games of the season. They blew a two goal lead in the playoff with Hamilton. For god's sake, they've been relegated from the Scottish Premiership, despite possibly the third biggest wage budget in the division. And, in the last few months, they played football so archaic that they should only have been allowed to play on TV in black and white. Team spirit had not only gone down the toilet, but it had been flushed round the u-bend and ended up in the sewage works.
And yet...everyone knew that Hibernian needed a clean start. The plan was always to muddle through to the end of the season and then, well, 'butcher' the squad. It wasn't just that Fenlon left behind a complete lack of full-backs and wingers, and had a fetish for central midfielders. The footballers at Easter Road were a pitiful bunch, containing too many has-beens (I'm looking at you, Kevin Thomson) and never-weres, who either couldn't pull up their socks when the going got tough or who quite blatantly chose not to. Terry Butcher is hardly a Guardiola-type when it comes to tactics, but few would question his motivational skills. He'd have had an easier job coaxing Ally McCoist to eat his vegetables than to gee up this mob. He may have told them to play the long-ball rubbish partly because none of them seemed up to the complicated task of an accurate five yard square pass.
I'm not saying that no manager could have fixed Hibs this season; only incompetence in all areas, including in the dugout, can explain such a collapse. Relegation is a catastrophe, particularly considering the circumstances - Hearts and Rangers are opponents next year, and there are only a maximum of two promotion spots. Three into two won't go. At least one of those clubs will be out of the Scottish Premiership until the summer of 2016 at the earliest. That's a sobering thought.
Butcher at least knows how to win Scotland's second tier - he did it with ICT in 2009-10 (albeit with the help of an almighty collapse from Dundee). So many players have left Leith already that he could now bring in his own faces, and mould the team in the way he wanted - which, given the last 18 months of his tenure in the Highlands, would have involved football far easier on the eye than the recent guff. And, in the public eye at least, you'd fancy that he might handle the pressure of the 'win-at-all-costs' environment a bit better than rookie Robbie Neilson at Hearts and the useless oaf in charge at Ibrox.
Am I convincing you? Perhaps not. I've barely convinced myself. The new manager will also have a clean slate to work with. But unless new Chief Exec Leanne Dempster has a rabbit in her hat - and I don't think Stuart McCall could fit in her hat - Hibs will end up appointing someone who has considerably less pedigree than Butcher, and that's a risk too.
L.
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