Rock Bottom

Bottom of the league, having lost five on the bounce…could it be any worse?

Well, it could be. The performance on Saturday was slightly encouraging, in that we definitely didn’t deserve to lose. Mackie and Miller looked a bit better together, Seve looked assured in the middle of the park, Mark Kerr did well for the goal and Aluko was good in the first half. There were a good few fans applauding the players off, which says a lot in the circumstances.

Then the downsides…we gave away far too many chances, and Hibs could have killed the game before Miller scored the equaliser. And the second half, when we should have gone for the kill, ended up a bit of a damp squib with our most creative player, Aluko, being starved of the ball. We are also gifting goals with our defending.

So what now? Well Calderwood will not be going for the foreseeable future, and I think giving him more time is the correct decision…for now. The games this season have been so marginal that we could have won or lost any of them, and a combination of bad luck and (more often) mistakes have cost us. Thinking back to last season, we weren’t playing much better than we did on Saturday, but we managed to grind out the results. A win or a break might yet kick-start the season.

That being said, even the most ardent Calderwood fan would agree that any manager who loses five games in a row, in any league, will be under pressure. We have Falkirk away and Hearts away in our next two games. Two defeats would see us rock bottom with seven straight defeats, with (almost) one round of fixtures played. There are a lot of arguments for and against the management of Jimmy Calderwood, but the league table will ultimately be the most compelling.