FOR Terry Butcher, managing Hibernian so far has quite literally been a piece of cake.
In addition to spending his first week acquainting himself with the club's secluded, state-of-the-art training ground at East Mains, on Monday the 54-year-old brought in a round of buns and invited his players to say their piece about precisely where they see the club going for the remainder of the season, starting with Saturday's match against St Mirren.
It is still early days, but so far the former Inverness Caledonian Thistle manager has been encouraged enough with what he has heard and seen to resist the idea of wholesale changes come January.
"We sat down with them on Monday once everybody was back and had a bit of cake," said Butcher. "I bought them, but I'm sending the bill in to Mr Petrie (Hibs' chairman). It was Tesco cakes at Caley Thistle, but now it's Marks and Spencer. Mention that and I might get some free stuff!
"We sat in the dressing room, which can be a very intimidating place, and got them all to speak, and they were very good and they were very funny," he added. "There's a fair bit of humour in there.
"The ones who volunteered to speak . . . they know what they have to do, they are clever boys and they know how they have to play and what is demanded of them and they want to do it. It wasn't clear-the-air talks, it was . . . 'so, come on, what do you want to achieve this season, what do you want to do?'
"Are we going to peter out? Is there going to be a big change? I'm not even looking at January, I'm looking at what we have here because what we have here is good enough to get results in the future."
Having worked with small teams in Spartan surroundings at both Motherwell and Inverness, Butcher still has the look of a child with a new toy when he surveys the facilities he has at East Mains. Nonetheless, it is imperative that the club gets a "better return" from them. "I see the sun set here and I see the sun rise here, although I don't stay here overnight," said Butcher. "But I just can't wait to get here, I really can't. I've got four different routes to get here from Morningside, where I'm staying just now. I don't need the sat-nav, I'm a native now, it's remarkable. I hope there are no nightmares around the corner, but I'm living the dream.
"We've got a podiatrist called Bill who introduced himself to me," added Butcher. "The one we had up at Inverness, Lynn, used to come in on a Monday and bring some eggs with her, because she kept chickens. Bill said 'I can't bring any eggs, what can I bring?', so I said, 'well, bring something, you've got to bring something to the party'."
It is little wonder that the 54-year-old cannot get the smile off his face, because these kinds of riches weren't even available during his glorious playing days. He recalls his Rangers stint and having to suffer the ignominy of trudging over the road to the Albion, these days the club's main matchday car park.
"We would train at the Albion and if you kicked the ball near to the fence you had to sprint after it, because the kids would duck under the fence and nick the ball," said Butcher.
"You had the Rangers players who nearly won the treble lifting the goals across from the Albion to Ibrox, because the kids would come across and saw them up for scrap. It was remarkable stuff.
"It was pretty fierce - when we first went there, wee Doddy, the kit man, got a knitted fishing jumper with a roll-neck. You didn't have all these new tracksuit tops and drill tops, it was Aran jumpers. We used to get one of them and cut a hole in the sleeve, where your thumb went through, and you were made up with that, it was brilliant."
Everything these days is "the way it should be" but nothing Butcher has seen so far tallies with the common conception that Hibernian players have become too cosseted and soft by it all. There have been "no prisoners" taken so far in "fierce" training sessions under assistant Maurice Malpas, while a near fully fit squad - only Alex Harris and Michael Nelson are out - has shown no signs of disharmony.
No decision has yet been made on whether James McPake will retain the captaincy, or the long-term future of the club's coaching staff, such as Scott Thomson and Alan Maybury, but a deal to take on Inverness scout Steve Marsella is "nearly done".
"I usually write a list of players in my diary when I am preparing for training the next day," Butcher said. "At Inverness, it would only take up half a page - here I am running out of room when I reach the bottom.
"In due course, when we sign players, it will be a great selling point to be able to bring a player here (to East Mains). At Caley Thistle, when they asked about the training facility, we used to have to say: 'Oh, I know a nice restaurant we can go to'."
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