New signing Miquel Nelom will not be in the Hibs’ squad for today’s league match at Dens Park due to a lack of match fitness after leaving Feyenoord at the end of last season, but Head Coach Neil Lennon is excited about the Dutch international providing competition for Lewis Stevenson.
Speaking at the pre-match press conference, Lennon said: “He (Miquel Nelom) has won a league title over there and up until last year he was playing in the Champions League. He finished the second half of the season in the top division in Holland with Sparta Rotterdam under Dick Advocaat.
“He has a good pedigree, good pace, good balance on the left side. We have always felt we needed cover or competition there for Lewis because he has been playing a lot of games over the last couple of years.
“We need to get him up to speed, Miquel, but at 27 he’s coming into his peak years so I think it’s a good bit of business for us.”
Lennon is anticipating a tough fixture against the side who are currently bottom of the league with no points despite some decent performances. Speculation mounts about the future of former Hearts’ winger Neil McCann with many believing that a Hibs’ victory will spell the end of his managerial career on Tayside.
Lennon continued: “I said to the players this morning, put yourself in the Dundee players’ shoes. Would you be motivated to have your professional pride? Would you play for the club and the manager? They all went: ‘Yes’. So I said, ‘well you are going to come up against a highly motivated team’.
“Forget the other results. If you look at some of the performances from Dundee, they’ve been good. So we can’t take this game lightly, think we can just roll in and roll out again with three points.
“We are going to have to earn them, and earn them the hard way. So we have left the players under no illusions about how difficult this game is going to be.”
John graduated from Telford College in 2010 with an HNC in Practical Journalism and since then he worked for the North Edinburgh News, The Southern Reporter, the Irish News Review and The Edinburgh Reporter. In addition he has been published in the Edinburgh Evening News and the Hibernian FC Programme.
