The passing of the legendary Gordon Smith, by all accounts the greatest player ever to grace a Hibs jersey. Continue reading
The Mogga Dawn, 27 June 2004
The headline has unfortunate echoes of one of the less complimentary epithets applied to Alex ‘Mogadon’ Miller (did he have any complimentary ones?) but this article provides more interesting detail on Mowbray’s ideas on management and building a team. Continue reading
Meet the new boss, 29 & 30 May 2004
Same as the old bo… awww, hang on a minute. Where the hell did he come from? He wasn’t in the bookies’ list. The east of Scotland resounded with the patter of scrunched up betting slips when Tony Mowbray was finally unveiled as the new Hibs manager. Such was the poverty of pundits’ imagination and the tightness of Hibs’ secrecy around their selection procedure that Mowbray arrived as completely out of the blue as any managerial appointment you are ever likely to see. Not since Mo Johnston popped up at Ibrox were so many eyebrows raised in the world of Scottish football. Continue reading
Williamson heads south, 18 April 2004
Bobby Williamson wasn’t looking for another job, but when Plymouth Argyle came looking for a replacement for Paul Sturrock he was happy to talk to them, in large part because the Hibs board didn’t try to stop him. That, taken along with the cut to his salary earlier in the season, the board invoking the clause to switch him from a five-year to a one-year rolling contract, and the difficulty in signing some of his preferred targets, made Williamson feel like he wasn’t particularly wanted, and it wouldn’t have needed any deep perceptive insight for him to know that a large part of the support didn’t feel that warm towards him either. Continue reading
Hibs 0-2 Livingston, CIS League Cup Final, 14 March 2004
I think I’m right in saying that no team has ever beaten both Celtic and Rangers on the way to Hampden and succeeded in lifting the trophy. Hibs beat both of them in winning the 1972 League Cup, but Celtic were beaten in the final itself. Aberdeen repeated that feat in 1989 by beating Celtic in the semis and Rangers in the final. But putting out both of them before the final seems to be a sure fire way of losing the most important fixture. Hibs did it in 1985, emptying the Old Firm in the quarters and semis in spectacular fashion before losing to Aberdeen. And so it was no different here against Livingston. Continue reading
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