Nick Montgomery looking for Borussia Dortmund style 'resilience' from Hibs players

Like millions of other football fans around the world, Nick Montgomery watched in admiration as Borussia Dortmund’s yellow wall repelled everything PSG could throw at them in Paris on Tuesday night. The positional discipline and teamwork of Edin Terzic’s side was a thing of beauty, to anyone with an interest in tactics and tacticians.

Beyond the X-and-O jottings of Terzic’s masterplan, however, something else stood out in the first of this week’s Champions League semi-final, second leg fixtures. A dogged determination in the Dortmund ranks. A refusal to yield in the face of unrelenting pressure.

If Montgomery doesn’t pretend that his under-performing Hibs team can exactly emulate that sort of competitive ferocity, he’s absolutely determined to address the frailties so evident in a season of late goals conceded and points scattered to the four winds. If that means bringing in a sports psychologist to help his players deal with the pressure of representing Hibs, then that’s what he’ll do.

“Resilience is a big word,” said Monty. “Putting it into practice takes time and effort. We talk here about mental skills and building a mental framework.

“Some players develop it as a young age. And you can improve it, for sure. But some players struggle with resilience, the ability to deal with pressure and expectation. Some cope with it really well.

“It’s a case of improving the players who struggle with it. And we’ve had a real lack of consistency on that throughout the season.

“It’s something we can try to address in training. Ultimately, it’s a process you have to go through, with no easy shortcut.

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“So it’s a great word, resilience. A great word. You can talk about the late goals we’ve conceded, people can call it game management, resilience, decision making. These are all things that, when you step on the pitch as a player, in those moments, that’s when you have to grab hold of games and see them out.

“It’s something we’ve really, as a club, let ourselves down on this season. Maybe sometimes you just have to work on it without talking about it – but, when it keeps rearing its head in games like at the weekend, we have to talk about it. It’s definitely a mental resilience thing that takes time to fix.

“I mean, yeah, I watched Dortmund last night. What an amazing team and amazing story. But you see examples of it all around the world, in all different sports.

“You also see examples of what we’ve gone through, for whatever reason. Consistently things not going the way you want them to go. It’s something you have to change.”

Montgomery, who inherited a huge mess when he replaced Lee Johnson in September, added: “I would like to bring in a sports psychologist. Obviously coming in mid-season, it’s hard to implement stuff.

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“But I’m a big believer in sports performance, sports psychology. It’s really important in the modern game – because there is so much negativity around. The players have to deal with negativity all the time.

“Having that positive mindset allows you to focus on the task ahead, which is winning a game in football, not getting caught up in all the noise that surrounds being an elite athlete these days.”