Hibs boss says no clearout in January

Hibs boss Pat Fenlon today revealed he’ll be making moves for new players in the January transfer window – but insisted he won’t indulge in a wholesale revamp of his Easter Road squad.

Fenlon has already identified one or two players who will probably leave the club in the near future, with Junior Agogo and Matt Thornhill having reportedly been told they can go.

But in an exclusive interview with the Evening News, the 42-year-old Irishman claimed he was generally happy with the squad he’d inherited from his predecessor Colin Calderwood.

Fenlon has already made it clear every player is playing for his future but he is determined to get the best out of each of them before determining how to reshape the squad.

And he insisted continually overhauling the squad, as has happened in recent years, isn’t the way forward.

Last January Calderwood brought in seven players – Thornhill, Victor Palsson, Akpo Sodje, Martin Scott, Ricardo Vaz Te, Richie Towell and Jakub Divis – with several more, including Garry O’Connor, Ivan Sproule, Agogo, Leigh Griffiths, Sean O’Hanlon and Isaiah Osbourne arriving in the summer as a host of familiar faces departed.

However, Fenlon revealed any changes he may make will be more restrained. As Hibs’ fifth manager in just four years he said: “Sometimes it can be easy to come in and say we are going to get rid of a lot of players and bring new ones in but that has probably happened too many times at this football club.

“It’s a case of ‘we have good players, can we get the best out of them?’ The one thing the club needs is continuity, that’s for certain. You are hoping you can get that continuity with the group of players, or the majority of them.

“At the end of the day I may want certain players to come in but I think there has to be a balance. If you keep changing everything it’s never going to settle and you never get to where you want to be.

“We need to try to get that balance right where we have continuity with players, but I also believe you need to freshen up players either way, whether you are doing well or not doing well. Not loads, but to keep things going, to keep people on their toes.

“There will be players who move, there’s no point in saying anything different but at the moment it’s all about trying to get the best out of players rather than worrying about having to move for other players.

“That’s not what I want to do, I want to give the boys here the chance to prove themselves. I firmly believe we have a good squad of players here but I don’t think the football club has been getting the best out of them. That’s up to me to try to do that and, at the end of the day, if it doesn’t work then you have to change it.”