Steve Clarke

[MWHIBBIES]

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Fenton was also fortunate enough to have 2 seasons worth of Leigh Griffiths - a luxury not afforded to the other duds

Eh, Calderwood signed Griffiths, he just got **** all out of him.


Fenlon was miles ahead of Calderwood. Their records speak for themselves.

[matty_f]

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What are you basing that on? A reporter from the Newcastle Chronicle told me we got him for precisely nowt as he moved to us about 2 weeks after Chris Hughton was sacked at Newcastle, where Calderwood had been his assistant, so that timeline would stack up.

This was the same Calderwood who asked to be supplied with books about Hibs shortly after he joined because he knew nothing about the club, and who also couldn't wait to get out of Easter Road on a Saturday after the match so he could catch the 6 o'clock flight to London.

He certainly wasn't cheap to sack that's for sure, after Petrie spurned approaches from other clubs, and remember he was photographed chatting to Steve McLaren who was manager of Nottingham Forest at the time, in some shopping centre down south. McLaren wanted him on his coaching staff.

So if dear old Rodney had swallowed his pride, we might have actually got rid of him and got a few bags of sweeties in return, instead of eventually paying him off, so win-win, but that would've meant Petrie admitting his mistake in appointing the joker in the first place, and we couldn't have that, could we?

Why couldn’t we have Petrie admitting a mistake? He made enough of them.

Re Calderwood not being cheap, he was on a very good package to bring him to the club, and the board also backed him with signings.

The decision not to take compensation for him at the point when it was available was based on the club having invested in him and feeling that they wanted some return on that, rather than having to rip it up and start again with a new guy.

At the time, I can understand that line of thinking, with hindsight it’s easy to say it was a bad decision.

[matty_f]

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Too big compared to what though?

That would suggest managers usually do much better here.

You’d have to give him some credit that he took a team that could have gone down and we ended up reasonably comfortable in the end.

After that I think his time is quite misunderstood.

From the next season onwards we spent significant time in the upper positions in the league. Some years ago when bored I looked at our league position after each game to see where we usually spent our time under Fenlon. From that season on we averaged 4th position.

We spent virtually no time in the bottom 6. A few weeks, but badly timed of course that season because we slipped into bottom 6. Two shocking refereeing decisions in the games before the split didn’t help. We did end up winning 4 of the 6 games, beat Hearts and got to another Scottish Cup final.

The start of the next season we had the bad European result - in a game where we ended up with a number of teenagers on the pitch who weren’t good enough or ready enough but obviously a bad result.

League wise we could have been doing much better of course but for a club who had not been doing it for some years we were looking on course enough to be top half when we started to agitate for him to resign.

You also can’t discount two Scottish Cup finals in both his seasons, regardless of the results.

He was an average to good Hibs manager. I don’t think the job was too big for him chat stands up and us largely based on views of the standard of football he’d managed at before rather than what he did here.

Too big compared to the job he had come from. I have no real issues with Fenlon, i think he’d have had a much better time of it here if he’d had the same set up/structure supporting him as Jack Ross does now, for example.