Leeann Dempster hails Hibs' boys of summer

Leeann Dempster is delighted to see a clutch of last summer’s signings featuring prominently in Hibs’ resurgence and vindicating the club’s faith in them.

The Easter Road chief executive was adamant both at the end of August and following the sacking of Paul Heckingbottom in November that recruitment at the start of this season had gone well despite several of the new faces struggling in their early months at the club.

The likes of Joe Newell, Adam Jackson and Christian Doidge have become key players in Jack Ross’s side in recent months, while Tom James and Melker Hallberg continue to feature in matchday squads, and Dempster is pleased that several of those who had been written off in some quarters are now showing why they were brought to the club in the first place.

“Very rarely does a football club recruit on the spur of the moment,” she stressed. “We knew the guys we were bringing in last summer. We knew a lot about them and we felt they could fit into our team. We felt there was a role for them up here. Take Christian, for example. He’s 28. We’ve known about him for about two and a half years but we stepped back from that just before he went to Bolton (in summer 2018) because he was in that market of just being unaffordable to us.

“We decided to look elsewhere but he then came back on our radar so when we had an opportunity to do a deal to get Christian here, we were really happy about it. A few of my colleagues at other clubs actually text me saying that’s a fantastic piece of business and we genuinely felt at the time it was a fantastic piece of business.”

Doidge, who waited until November to score his first league, has gone on to net 16 times in all competitions. Dempster believes it is important that new signings are allowed time to find their feet when joining the club.

“We need to remember these players are just people at the end of the day,” she said. “They’re coming up and moving into a different place, coming to a different club and they need to settle in.

“We had quite a big change last summer so I’m really happy for them that they’re starting to show their qualities now because a lot of them had questions asked of them early doors. At the end of the day, these guys are just young professionals and you just want them all to do well and be happy to be here.”