Lee Johnson has asked for "longevity" at Hibs and insists he won't change his bold management approach in order to turn the club's fortunes around.
The Leith side are on a miserable run of just one win in their last six matches and were booed off by their own supporters on Tuesday night after a 2-0 home defeat against Ross County. Johnson is looking for his men to respond when they travel to bottom side Kilmarnock this weekend for their final clash before the season takes a pause for the World Cup. And the former Sunderland boss, who continues to be without key men such as Aiden McGeady and Kevin Nisbet, reckons what's going on at Easter Road is a work in progress and he feels has the support of the board to turn the fortunes around.
Hibs sit seventh in the Scottish Premiership but are only two points behind third placed Aberdeen despite their sticky recent form. "You give everything you can at the moment in time," said Johnson, when asked how he deals with the brutal business of modern-day football. "You work with what you've got and try to do the best you possibly can.
"As a football manager, part of the role is to make peace with the worst-case scenario and that allows you to be bold. The one thing that can never be thrown at me is that I'm not bold in terms of decision making. I have always felt like that, I played like that in terms of I didn't fear. It is my personality. You obviously have to manage the players you have got. Look at our injury list, you might have to tweak the dial because you are missing three or four pieces of the jigsaw.
"I don't always get it right but the way for us to improve is to have longevity, to have the same manager, to have four, five, six transfer windows. We want to be third, minimum, but it is a work in progress, to get there. I don't know the history. Someone mentioned we have finished third three or four times in 35 years so we have to be different, not necessarily over-complicate things but be better at what we do over a period of time so in that case there has to be a collective.
"However, focus always turns to the manager based on those individual results and unfortunately as a manager that is one of the considerations you have to live with and now with a social media element that can fire a particular theory, feeling or pattern very quickly, it becomes something you have to manage. But it doesn't stop you doing your job in the correct way and I feel here that I have the support of everybody and feel like we are going to be successful."
