I spent two hours in football conversation with Paul Heckingbottom in April. He was not long in the door at Easter Road and explained to me his reasons for having gone back to university to take a BSc in sports coaching, how he might have been content to remain a youth coach all his days and why he believed “academia” — his word — was becoming increasingly important in football.
Our conversation bowled along in spate as Heckingbottom unloaded idea after idea about the ways of modern football.
What a coup it seemed for Hibs to have attracted him. Twelve months earlier he had been viewed as one of the coming men of coaching in England, having had success with Barnsley before being lured away by Leeds United. There, in February last year, Heckingbottom was taking on one of the most prestigious jobs in English football, and also one of the most notorious. He was Leeds’ ninth manager in five years before being binned like the rest of them: turfed out after four months in charge.
So it was impressive to see Heckingbottom re-enter the game at Easter Road. But, on that April afternoon, he interrupted me to say: “As a coach, you have to understand what your skill-set is, and be the best at it. Plus, at the top end, the game is all about winning, and not so much about education.”
This became the nub of it for Paul Heckingbottom. “The winning” for him came to be severely rationed at Easter Road, as Hibs boast an atrocious league record stretching back to last April. This season they have won only one of their 11 games so far in the Ladbrokes Premiership to leave them a point off the foot of the table. There was no escaping it: Heckingbottom has been prime sacking fodder for weeks, and the Hibbee faithful have not yearned for him to remain.
Two other thoughts sprang to mind about my long conversation with him, when news of his sacking emerged yesterday. The first concerned a question I put to him about the standard of the top flight in Scottish football, and where Heckingbottom would place it on quality within the league structure in England.
“Quality-wise it’s on a par with League One in England — lower half,” he replied. I was slightly startled by this, not that I hugely disagreed with him. If you exclude Celtic and Rangers, then there probably is a tranche of teams in the Scottish Premiership who are third-tier material in England. But what I do remember thinking was: is this the bar that Heckingbottom will set for Hibs on his player recruitment? Because if it is, it is a low bar.
I’m not convinced that the now former Hibs head coach called it right here. Over the summer he signed a bunch of players — Josh Vela, Christian Doidge, Tom James, Adam Jackson and more — who, on numerous occasions, have looked like English lower-league journeymen. Back in August, when Hibs lost 3-0 to Motherwell at Fir Park, I was scratching my head to work out why all Heckingbottom’s summer signings were either on the bench or not even stripped for action that afternoon. “They’re not good enough,” a seasoned Hibs watcher told me.
After that loss, Heckingbottom made the remarkable admission that he couldn’t wait for January to get new bodies in. I thought: were these recent ten weeks of summer not the time to get this done?
My second thought about my conversation with Heckingbottom in April was: just how much did he know about Scottish football, and would this be a factor? He told me: “It has been a real challenge for me, because I have gone from the Championship in England where I knew everything inside out — every manager, every player, every club, every game — to a situation here where I didn’t know the managers, their tactics, their substitution options, etc.
“In terms of Scottish football, it has been all about learning and taking in as many games as possible. I didn’t know a lot about it, being honest.”
In truth, this shouldn’t have been an insurmountable obstacle. Players and coaches change clubs and enter new environments the world over, and they simply adapt, bringing success or failure. A lack of knowledge of Scottish football should not have hindered Heckingbottom at Hibs, except in one area: in watching rival clubs and players, and assessing his own team, would he make the right judgment calls? In this context it seems he has failed.
I will be surprised if Heckingbottom is not a success once more in English football. He has proved himself there before. But at Hibs, he made some costly wrong calls, and has rightly paid for them with his job.
