The Hibernian Thread

[Zing.]

Mallan seems to be away to the same Turkish side he was with last season. Hopefully a permanent deal. 

Fairly quiet on incomings just now. 
 

edit: Seems to be permanent. £150k+ is the fee. 

Edited July 16, 2021 by Zing.

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

Santa Coloma confirmed for our European tie now. Obviously know nothing about them but spent a weekend in Andorra once and it's very nice (except the capital which is a giant duty free)

[The Other Foot]

1 hour ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:

Santa Coloma confirmed for our European tie now. Obviously know nothing about them but spent a weekend in Andorra once and it's very nice (except the capital which is a giant duty free)

A village of 3,000 people. No stadium of their own. Only six of their players have Wikipedia pages. 

 

3-0 to Santa Coloma. 

[Leith Green]

Goals in pre season friendly v Raith, plus a few minutes with Ross. 

Good to see Doidge back on for 20 mins after his Covid

 

 

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

Whitney Tom James has passed away been free transferred to Leyton Orient. RIP u will live on forever. Cant believe it. I wanna run to u. Really cant believe this. @

[Lyle Lanley]

Hanlon - New Captain

McGinn - Vice Captain 

[The Grass Is Greener.]

The comments under the official Twitter account are fucking brutal, all the time.

[The Other Foot]

28 minutes ago, The Grass Is Greener. said:

The comments under the official Twitter account are fucking brutal, all the time.

"Porteous robbed of captaincy"

 

[DukDukGoose]

Spoiler

When George Craig called time on his career in football, the door opened for Graeme Mathie to become Hibernian’s first sporting director.

The baton of responsibility would be handed over at the start of 2020, which seemed the perfect time to get his feet under the table — but little did Mathie know what lay inside his desk would be a premonition of the next 18 months.

“I found a painter’s mask in the drawer that he left me, so I’m pretty sure he saw it coming when he retired.”

Although he states that nothing can prepare you for COVID-19 and the financial and logistical challenges it has created in the game, Mathie was given a good grounding in his five years as the club’s head of recruitment.

“George was great with me as he allowed me to go and negotiate 80/90 per cent of deals with players, agents and clubs and that’s not something you usually get as a head of recruitment,” he says. “It helped stretch me and push me.”

Mathie talks to The Athletic in detail about the latest failed proposal to restructure Scottish football, the “bunker room” Hibs use to plot their recruitment, using data to appoint Jack Ross and the ambition to cement their place as the third power in Scotland, but the familiarity with negotiations has created a refreshingly honest stance when it comes to the valuations of their most valuable players — Kevin Nisbet, Ryan Porteous and Josh Doig.

“It’s a bit of a personal crusade but I’d love to break the club’s transfer record,” he says.

“With the Brexit market as it is, we should be getting more money for Scottish players.

“I have had some robust conversations where I’ve said, ‘If you take the player at our club and make them Belgian or Dutch or Swedish, we’re not talking about the same number (transfer fee)’. Our league is competitive, our club competed in the top end of it and played in national semi-finals and finals last year. At some point, people need to recognise that.

“There is a long list now of players who have gone down south and done very well.

“The bit that annoys me, and I don’t mind saying it, but (Brentford striker) Ivan Toney leaves League One (Peterborough United) for the Championship for significantly more than what we have potentially been offered for our players. He had an incredibly good season, but nobody can tell me that scoring goals in League One is worth five or six times the money of someone scoring goals at the top end of the Premiership. That is the part that has to change.

“I don’t see why they are perceived as significantly better.”

As far as the inner workings of a football club go, Mathie has experience of seeing how it operates from just about all angles.

The Scot left school at 16 to play for Coventry City down south but after eight years in the game, he moved into youth coaching at Celtic. He worked his way up to become one of John Park’s scouting analysts at a time around a decade ago when Celtic developed a reputation for unearthing great potential in the likes of Victor Wanyama and Virgil van Dijk, before spending time developing the nation’s youth football structure for the Scottish FA.

His role at Hibernian only came about after Craig had been true to his word and rung him 18 months after a role he had discussed with Kilmarnock had been and gone.

“I’ve learned loads, so these experiences help, but you come into these things and with your own ideas,” he says.

So did Hibs’ owner Ronald Gordon, the US businessman who became the Edinburgh club’s majority shareholder two years ago this month.

The “Hibernian DNA” document, about what sort of club they wanted to be, written before their return to the Premiership in the summer of 2017, has since incorporated some of his ambitions, which include becoming more global in their search for players and establishing themselves as the home for young Scottish talent.

“He (Gordon) wants people to look at Hibs and say, ‘That’s the club I want to be at, as I will get a chance and develop in a shop window to kick my career on’,” says Mathie, who jokes he asks the agent of John McGinn, the club’s poster boy in this sense, every window whether this is the one he should be expecting the sell-on clause that was part of the summer 2018 deal that took him to Aston Villa to come north.

Hibernian’s recruitment has stood out over the past two years because they have been finding value in the Scottish market and achieving squad stability by offering multi-year deals in a league that always sees a lot of churn each summer.

Last season, they picked up Drey Wright from St Johnstone, Alex Gogic from Hamilton Academical, Kyle Magennis from St Mirren and Nisbet from Championship side Dunfermline Athletic. They also brought midfielder Chris Cadden, who broke through at Motherwell as a teenager, back from 18 months with MLS side Columbus Crew in January.

Already this summer, they have signed 20-year-old Daniel McKay from Championship side Inverness Caledonian Thistle and 22-year-old Jake Doyle-Hayes from St Mirren, while 19-year-old Steven Bradley is threatening to break into the side after joining from Queen’s Park’s under-18s side in 2019.

With Rangers and Celtic buying fewer domestic players in recent years, there appears to be an opportunity for Hibernian to build that core of young Scottish players.

“We’ve done a few over the last few years because it’s the first place to look,” says Mathie. “Kevin (Nisbet) made the step up and we hope Dan McKay can replicate his Championship form. There is a risk no matter where you bring players in from, but we do hope we can do it.

“Jack (Ross, the manager) has had a huge input into it too, as I imagine there is a temptation as a manager to get safe players who are a bit more established who we know can do us a job and win us games. But Jack hasn’t been like that. He enjoys working with young players and making them better, so that gives me a lot of comfort when discussing signings.

“If you’re only ever offering one or two years, it becomes difficult to generate a value. If you bring in a young player, it shows a real commitment and at times we have incentivised it so the contract increases over time. It gives us time to develop them too, and we think our sports science and medical departments are up there with the best in the country. The way they can physically develop players and keep them on the pitch week after week is incredible.

“For example, would Kevin have got closer to the Celtic first team by going directly there rather than come to Hibs first? It’s probably a question that can’t be answered but he has changed his body shape within a year and I think he’s more sought-after due to a season in the Premiership. Sometimes players need that extra step.”

Hibernian had to make significant cuts to staffing during the pandemic across various departments. COVID-19 has had its impact on the academy and scouting too, but Mathie learned from Park’s processes and knows how managing information well can inform better decision-making, even during the formative era of video scouting which consisted of burning footage of players onto a DVD.

“Calvin Charlton has been with us since 2015 as lead analyst but, midway through last season, I asked him to take a far greater leadership role in recruitment analysis, so he’s taken those skills and added the data components.

“With Jake Doyle-Hayes, we’re really clear on him and the type of player he can be as the data shows up what he’s done in the league. We’re able to show the staff why we think we could push the boundaries more with the way we set up and the players around him.”

The recruitment strategy is underpinned by an emphasis on planning.

“We call it a bunker room,” Mathie says. “It’s a whiteboard in one room with three slots for every position. It’s not an exact science but it’s a first choice, a cover player and a development player.

“George and I went down to (England’s base at) St George’s Park and they had something similar. We want to assess talent properly but that’s hard. What we did with our coaches was put the names of every kid in the academy on the left side of the board and asked them to move the kids you think have a genuine chance of making the first team to the right.

“The sports science guys said, ‘Here are the best athletes’ — so they had a coloured star. Then it was, ‘Who has the best attitude?’ and, ‘Who wants to learn the most?’ When you start to build it up, it gives you a totally different picture of what you think talent might be.

“The best example is Ryan Porteous. The question was posed, ‘Can Porteous move from the development box to (the) cover (box)?’; if he can, it means we can spend more money on an area we really want to invest in. We’ve got a bit of a gap now as there are only one or two 18/19-year-olds who are in the system but we hope in the next 12 months there are others pushing into that cover position.”

Long-time club captain David Gray has just moved into a coaching role at age 33 after seven years of service, which included one of the most iconic goals in Hibs’ history — the stoppage-time winner against Rangers to clinch the Scottish Cup in 2016. That leaves Darren McGregor, Paul Hanlon, Jamie Murphy and Lewis Stevenson as the only players over the age of 30 in the squad but they are laying the groundwork for that transition.

“I see that as the next phase of my role: to create roles for these guys to remain with us,” says Mathie. “We have first-team mentor roles in the academy where a player is aligned with an age group — going to games and having Zoom calls with them. It’s trying to create that link so that when it comes to deciding about retiring, rather than having a decision to jump into something they’ve had the experience to migrate into something. It would be criminal to lose these guys’ experience and values.”

Youth development is something Mathie is passionate about and improving the player pathway is part of the reason why he has created a network of partner clubs with non-League neighbours Civil Service Strollers, Stenhousemuir, Charleston Battery of the US second tier and the Premier League’s Brighton & Hove Albion.

“I think there is a realisation in Scotland that we seem to struggle with the transition piece of youth development,” he says. We’ve always seemed to compete up until 16 and, for some reason, it seems to tail off.

“I look at Dundee United and think, ‘Fair play’ to what they’ve done (promoting Tam Courts from the academy to be their new manager). They’ve taken a major gamble but what they’ve said is, ‘This is the most important part for us now’. The acid test of that will be how results go but at least they have a vision and are putting things in place.

“England produced a player book, so for a geeky guy like me, I love it. It was about looking at where the hotbeds have been and why that is. But they found that most of their centre-backs hadn’t been capped below under-19 level. They were picking the players at the top teams who weren’t doing a lot of defending.

“I spoke to Craig Mulholland (Rangers’ head of academy) about this and I mentioned it. He said, ‘The next time we play you and it’s three 30-minute periods, why don’t you do us a favour and play direct and throw balls into the box and make our defenders defend? Then, in the second period, you pick a theme — press us high up, so we can play out through pressure; and then we’ll both play our style the last 30.”

Original thinking is what the Scottish Football innovation proposal, which included the inclusion of Rangers and Celtic B teams in the SPFL as an option, tried to bring together but it still failed to win enough backing.

“I look at the innovation paper and the question I keep asking is, ‘Where does it sit?’” says Mathie. “There does seem to be a bit of a vacuum because I think the Scottish FA see themselves as running the game up to the under-18 league while the SPFL is the reserve league and upwards, so there is a middle bit where no one seems in charge of it. What does a good strategy look like when you don’t know who is responsible for driving it?”

Hibs have been drawn to play Malta’s Gzira United or HNK Rijeka of Croatia in the third qualifying round of the new Europa Conference League next month (assuming, that is, they see off Andorra’s Santa Coloma over the next two Thursdays). Win that, and they’ll be a two-leg play-off away from the group phase. Mathie says the money that comes with any kind of European group-stage football would be a “gamechanger” for Hibernian.

“We feel that Hibs hasn’t really competed in Europe for long enough,” he says. “It’s rightly recognised as one of the biggest clubs in the country but it’s not really got a long history of achieving that level of place in the league. To finish third last season was great but for it to be the first time in 16 years wasn’t great. It should have been able to do it a lot more.

“Holding onto our assets would be great as that keeps the core of the group who achieved a good degree of success last year, but we do want to add one or two that can give us something different and help us go one further as we were disappointed that we didn’t win silverware last year.

“We don’t think we’re too far away from being able to do it.”

An interview with Graeme Mathie from The Athletic.

[Lyle Lanley]

2 hours ago, The Other Foot said:

"Porteous robbed of captaincy"

 

Porteous should be nowhere near the captaincy.  

[Zing.]

2 hours ago, Merkland Red said:

  Hide contents

When George Craig called time on his career in football, the door opened for Graeme Mathie to become Hibernian’s first sporting director.

The baton of responsibility would be handed over at the start of 2020, which seemed the perfect time to get his feet under the table — but little did Mathie know what lay inside his desk would be a premonition of the next 18 months.

“I found a painter’s mask in the drawer that he left me, so I’m pretty sure he saw it coming when he retired.”

Although he states that nothing can prepare you for COVID-19 and the financial and logistical challenges it has created in the game, Mathie was given a good grounding in his five years as the club’s head of recruitment.

“George was great with me as he allowed me to go and negotiate 80/90 per cent of deals with players, agents and clubs and that’s not something you usually get as a head of recruitment,” he says. “It helped stretch me and push me.”

Mathie talks to The Athletic in detail about the latest failed proposal to restructure Scottish football, the “bunker room” Hibs use to plot their recruitment, using data to appoint Jack Ross and the ambition to cement their place as the third power in Scotland, but the familiarity with negotiations has created a refreshingly honest stance when it comes to the valuations of their most valuable players — Kevin Nisbet, Ryan Porteous and Josh Doig.

“It’s a bit of a personal crusade but I’d love to break the club’s transfer record,” he says.

“With the Brexit market as it is, we should be getting more money for Scottish players.

“I have had some robust conversations where I’ve said, ‘If you take the player at our club and make them Belgian or Dutch or Swedish, we’re not talking about the same number (transfer fee)’. Our league is competitive, our club competed in the top end of it and played in national semi-finals and finals last year. At some point, people need to recognise that.

“There is a long list now of players who have gone down south and done very well.

“The bit that annoys me, and I don’t mind saying it, but (Brentford striker) Ivan Toney leaves League One (Peterborough United) for the Championship for significantly more than what we have potentially been offered for our players. He had an incredibly good season, but nobody can tell me that scoring goals in League One is worth five or six times the money of someone scoring goals at the top end of the Premiership. That is the part that has to change.

“I don’t see why they are perceived as significantly better.”

As far as the inner workings of a football club go, Mathie has experience of seeing how it operates from just about all angles.

The Scot left school at 16 to play for Coventry City down south but after eight years in the game, he moved into youth coaching at Celtic. He worked his way up to become one of John Park’s scouting analysts at a time around a decade ago when Celtic developed a reputation for unearthing great potential in the likes of Victor Wanyama and Virgil van Dijk, before spending time developing the nation’s youth football structure for the Scottish FA.

His role at Hibernian only came about after Craig had been true to his word and rung him 18 months after a role he had discussed with Kilmarnock had been and gone.

“I’ve learned loads, so these experiences help, but you come into these things and with your own ideas,” he says.

So did Hibs’ owner Ronald Gordon, the US businessman who became the Edinburgh club’s majority shareholder two years ago this month.

The “Hibernian DNA” document, about what sort of club they wanted to be, written before their return to the Premiership in the summer of 2017, has since incorporated some of his ambitions, which include becoming more global in their search for players and establishing themselves as the home for young Scottish talent.

“He (Gordon) wants people to look at Hibs and say, ‘That’s the club I want to be at, as I will get a chance and develop in a shop window to kick my career on’,” says Mathie, who jokes he asks the agent of John McGinn, the club’s poster boy in this sense, every window whether this is the one he should be expecting the sell-on clause that was part of the summer 2018 deal that took him to Aston Villa to come north.

Hibernian’s recruitment has stood out over the past two years because they have been finding value in the Scottish market and achieving squad stability by offering multi-year deals in a league that always sees a lot of churn each summer.

Last season, they picked up Drey Wright from St Johnstone, Alex Gogic from Hamilton Academical, Kyle Magennis from St Mirren and Nisbet from Championship side Dunfermline Athletic. They also brought midfielder Chris Cadden, who broke through at Motherwell as a teenager, back from 18 months with MLS side Columbus Crew in January.

Already this summer, they have signed 20-year-old Daniel McKay from Championship side Inverness Caledonian Thistle and 22-year-old Jake Doyle-Hayes from St Mirren, while 19-year-old Steven Bradley is threatening to break into the side after joining from Queen’s Park’s under-18s side in 2019.

With Rangers and Celtic buying fewer domestic players in recent years, there appears to be an opportunity for Hibernian to build that core of young Scottish players.

“We’ve done a few over the last few years because it’s the first place to look,” says Mathie. “Kevin (Nisbet) made the step up and we hope Dan McKay can replicate his Championship form. There is a risk no matter where you bring players in from, but we do hope we can do it.

“Jack (Ross, the manager) has had a huge input into it too, as I imagine there is a temptation as a manager to get safe players who are a bit more established who we know can do us a job and win us games. But Jack hasn’t been like that. He enjoys working with young players and making them better, so that gives me a lot of comfort when discussing signings.

“If you’re only ever offering one or two years, it becomes difficult to generate a value. If you bring in a young player, it shows a real commitment and at times we have incentivised it so the contract increases over time. It gives us time to develop them too, and we think our sports science and medical departments are up there with the best in the country. The way they can physically develop players and keep them on the pitch week after week is incredible.

“For example, would Kevin have got closer to the Celtic first team by going directly there rather than come to Hibs first? It’s probably a question that can’t be answered but he has changed his body shape within a year and I think he’s more sought-after due to a season in the Premiership. Sometimes players need that extra step.”

Hibernian had to make significant cuts to staffing during the pandemic across various departments. COVID-19 has had its impact on the academy and scouting too, but Mathie learned from Park’s processes and knows how managing information well can inform better decision-making, even during the formative era of video scouting which consisted of burning footage of players onto a DVD.

“Calvin Charlton has been with us since 2015 as lead analyst but, midway through last season, I asked him to take a far greater leadership role in recruitment analysis, so he’s taken those skills and added the data components.

“With Jake Doyle-Hayes, we’re really clear on him and the type of player he can be as the data shows up what he’s done in the league. We’re able to show the staff why we think we could push the boundaries more with the way we set up and the players around him.”

The recruitment strategy is underpinned by an emphasis on planning.

“We call it a bunker room,” Mathie says. “It’s a whiteboard in one room with three slots for every position. It’s not an exact science but it’s a first choice, a cover player and a development player.

“George and I went down to (England’s base at) St George’s Park and they had something similar. We want to assess talent properly but that’s hard. What we did with our coaches was put the names of every kid in the academy on the left side of the board and asked them to move the kids you think have a genuine chance of making the first team to the right.

“The sports science guys said, ‘Here are the best athletes’ — so they had a coloured star. Then it was, ‘Who has the best attitude?’ and, ‘Who wants to learn the most?’ When you start to build it up, it gives you a totally different picture of what you think talent might be.

“The best example is Ryan Porteous. The question was posed, ‘Can Porteous move from the development box to (the) cover (box)?’; if he can, it means we can spend more money on an area we really want to invest in. We’ve got a bit of a gap now as there are only one or two 18/19-year-olds who are in the system but we hope in the next 12 months there are others pushing into that cover position.”

Long-time club captain David Gray has just moved into a coaching role at age 33 after seven years of service, which included one of the most iconic goals in Hibs’ history — the stoppage-time winner against Rangers to clinch the Scottish Cup in 2016. That leaves Darren McGregor, Paul Hanlon, Jamie Murphy and Lewis Stevenson as the only players over the age of 30 in the squad but they are laying the groundwork for that transition.

“I see that as the next phase of my role: to create roles for these guys to remain with us,” says Mathie. “We have first-team mentor roles in the academy where a player is aligned with an age group — going to games and having Zoom calls with them. It’s trying to create that link so that when it comes to deciding about retiring, rather than having a decision to jump into something they’ve had the experience to migrate into something. It would be criminal to lose these guys’ experience and values.”

Youth development is something Mathie is passionate about and improving the player pathway is part of the reason why he has created a network of partner clubs with non-League neighbours Civil Service Strollers, Stenhousemuir, Charleston Battery of the US second tier and the Premier League’s Brighton & Hove Albion.

“I think there is a realisation in Scotland that we seem to struggle with the transition piece of youth development,” he says. We’ve always seemed to compete up until 16 and, for some reason, it seems to tail off.

“I look at Dundee United and think, ‘Fair play’ to what they’ve done (promoting Tam Courts from the academy to be their new manager). They’ve taken a major gamble but what they’ve said is, ‘This is the most important part for us now’. The acid test of that will be how results go but at least they have a vision and are putting things in place.

“England produced a player book, so for a geeky guy like me, I love it. It was about looking at where the hotbeds have been and why that is. But they found that most of their centre-backs hadn’t been capped below under-19 level. They were picking the players at the top teams who weren’t doing a lot of defending.

“I spoke to Craig Mulholland (Rangers’ head of academy) about this and I mentioned it. He said, ‘The next time we play you and it’s three 30-minute periods, why don’t you do us a favour and play direct and throw balls into the box and make our defenders defend? Then, in the second period, you pick a theme — press us high up, so we can play out through pressure; and then we’ll both play our style the last 30.”

Original thinking is what the Scottish Football innovation proposal, which included the inclusion of Rangers and Celtic B teams in the SPFL as an option, tried to bring together but it still failed to win enough backing.

“I look at the innovation paper and the question I keep asking is, ‘Where does it sit?’” says Mathie. “There does seem to be a bit of a vacuum because I think the Scottish FA see themselves as running the game up to the under-18 league while the SPFL is the reserve league and upwards, so there is a middle bit where no one seems in charge of it. What does a good strategy look like when you don’t know who is responsible for driving it?”

Hibs have been drawn to play Malta’s Gzira United or HNK Rijeka of Croatia in the third qualifying round of the new Europa Conference League next month (assuming, that is, they see off Andorra’s Santa Coloma over the next two Thursdays). Win that, and they’ll be a two-leg play-off away from the group phase. Mathie says the money that comes with any kind of European group-stage football would be a “gamechanger” for Hibernian.

“We feel that Hibs hasn’t really competed in Europe for long enough,” he says. “It’s rightly recognised as one of the biggest clubs in the country but it’s not really got a long history of achieving that level of place in the league. To finish third last season was great but for it to be the first time in 16 years wasn’t great. It should have been able to do it a lot more.

“Holding onto our assets would be great as that keeps the core of the group who achieved a good degree of success last year, but we do want to add one or two that can give us something different and help us go one further as we were disappointed that we didn’t win silverware last year.

“We don’t think we’re too far away from being able to do it.”

An interview with Graeme Mathie from The Athletic.

Decent read. Thanks for sharing. 

[DukDukGoose]

19 minutes ago, Zing. said:

Decent read. Thanks for sharing. 

No bother.

The non-OF articles on the Athletic are always a good read. Don't get enough of them sadly.

[Lofarl]

Good article that.  Always like the athletic YouTube videos.  Or tifo football.  Think they are one and the same.

[DukDukGoose]

1 minute ago, Lofarl said:

Good article that.  Always like the athletic YouTube videos.  Or tifo football.  Think they are one and the same.

There's a bit of crossover there but not sure how it works exactly.

Loads of interesting videos on the tifo YouTube page though.

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

1 hour ago, Merkland Red said:

There's a bit of crossover there but not sure how it works exactly.

Loads of interesting videos on the tifo YouTube page though.

I think I'm in love with JJ Bull as I both hate the mumbling p***k and yet find him very endearing 

[DukDukGoose]

4 minutes ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:

I think I'm in love with JJ Bull as I both hate the mumbling p***k and yet find him very endearing 

Haha. He's a bit strange but you can tell he's a genuine guy.

[capt_oats]

15 hours ago, Merkland Red said:

There's a bit of crossover there but not sure how it works exactly.

Loads of interesting videos on the tifo YouTube page though.

I've not really been paying much attention as I found The Totally... Scottish podcast pretty awful so gave it a heavy swerve but I noticed that The Athletic had bought over Muddy Knees Media who did the Totally Football pods. 

https://www.thetotallyfootballshow.com/feature/muddy-knees-media-and-the-totally-football-show-are-now-part-of-the-athletic/

It only came to my attention through a Barry Glendenning tweet about Iain Macintosh yesterday and a subsequent scroll through Macintosh's TL.

 

Edited July 21, 2021 by capt_oats

[RiG]

Fair play to Hibs* for asking folk to turn up at the ground 3 hours before kick off

*Might be at the request of the SG of course.

[The Grass Is Greener.]

Those times can’t be right  

[Les Cabbage]

I think (and hope) they’ve just copy and pasted what was done for the Arsenal game (6pm kick off) by mistake.

I’ll be turning up inebriated at 7:30 and not a minute earlier and if I get turned away, I live within a 5 minute walk so I’ll simply go home and watch it whilst continuing to get more inebriated.

Edit: I’m correct - scenes

Edited July 21, 2021 by Les Cabbage