Losing 5-0 at home is bad enough for any manager but attempting to stat it off is best avoided.
Take your medicine, lie low and move on quickly.
To go public with the claim ‘Take away the goalposts and we are able to compete’ must be causing terror in the Tynecastle boardroom.
It’s not just on the park that Ian Cathro is a rookie, trying to explain and salvage something from a 5-0 defeat that could easily have been seven or eight is madness.
When a manager plays the ‘small margins’ card I cringe. Almost every match is won or lost by small margins, they pick up big salaries to make small margins go in their favour.
Over 90 minutes at home you’d expect to have some periods of possession, create chance and force saves out of the opposition keeper.
Life away from the whiteboard and power-point is proving difficult for Cathro, unless he develops some realism without ditching his theories he could well be binned in the summer as realism invades the boardroom. Rather than fine margins, cutting your losses will be the message.
“We lost 5-0, but there are different parts to games,” he explained to The Sun.
“There are points when the game is alive and points where the game is no longer alive.
“In the first half we went with an attitude of ‘No, we are going to play and win the game’.
“So we went toe to toe and played against them.
“Nobody in the land can tell me we were inferior in the first 45 minutes. I’m not having it.
“Let’s be clear — I’m not passing comment on a 5-0 defeat as a whole and saying we competed.
“I know they scored five against us but if we assess what happened in the period when the game was there and alive, I can’t allow anyone to say we were inferior.
“There were situations where we could have gone ahead.
“If a couple of things were slightly different then it is 2-0 to us at half-time. Take away the goalposts and we are able to compete.
“We are able to go toe-to-toe and put in a performance which made the game a game.
“It wasn’t one team waiting on Celtic to score.
“Everybody who was there recognised that we were more than capable of playing against them and playing our part in the game — to such an extent that we probably had slightly more chances in the first half.”
Cathro takes Hearts to St Johnstone knowing that a defeat will leave them five points behind the Perth side and closer to sixth place than fourth.
If that happens Cathro will have more to worry about than removing the goalposts.