Hibs travel to Falkirk today for what could be an early indicator for which team will be challenging for the promotion places at the end of the season. The last time the two sides met was in a certain play-off game at the Falkirk Stadium towards the middle of May, despite that seeming like only yesterday there have been several changes at both clubs since. The biggest change of all comes with Hibs management team no longer being led by Alan Stubbs and assistant, John Doolan who moved south to join Rotherham United shortly after the Edinburgh club won the Scottish Cup. That move has had implications for the Bairns with Stubbs taking Will Vaulks down South with him. Stubbs’ replacement, Neil Lennon arrives at the Falkirk Stadium today for his first Ladbrokes Championship game in charge of Hibs and he will be looking to get one over Peter Houston’s men. It’s set to be a game that will tell us a lot about the potential outlook for the remainder of the season.
Falkirk manager Houston said: "We’re looking forward to it. It’s the start of a new league campaign and if it’s the same as last year there’ll be a lot of highs and if we can eradicate the one or two lows we had then we should be aiming to get into the play-offs again. Right away we’ll set a target of trying to get so many points per quarter, we’ll try and maintain that and see where it takes us. It’s important that we hit the ground running. We have a tough start going away to Queen of the South and Morton after Hibs, but again without looking too much ahead we want to take it one game at a time. We have to stay strong collectively as a group because we want to get points of the board, but that’s easier said than done. We want to try and make the Falkirk Stadium a fortress again, we built that last year by only losing twice here. We only lost two away games last year as well and both of them were at Ibrox so if someone was to tell me that we’d only lose four games this season I’d buy it, but that would be difficult. I’ve got huge respect for Neil Lennon, anyone who has taken Celtic into the last 16 of the Champions League against the likes of Barcelona deserves respect. He went to Bolton and in hindsight it was one of the most difficult clubs to do it at, but he was brave enough to do it. He will add things to that Hibernian squad that will make them harder to beat."