Some questions are rarely asked and never answered.

Is it worse to lose to St Mirren than to Ross County? Is the former player-hero turned saviour the curse of the eternally gullible club?

Is it best, for that matter, to commence the season with attractive verve and then fall apart? Or should you just fall apart from the start, bit by miserable bit?

Finally, for a bonus point, try this: is "expansive" football impossible in the grubby slog of the SPL, or is the very suggestion, as someone said, only an excuse?

We speak, of course, of two managers with things in common. Tony Mowbray and John Hughes share that Hibs 
pedigree, of course. Both men also possess what lofty souls term "a philosophy".
And both have a talent for bafflement unknown to Socrates.

There are differences. Hughes is still in a job, for one thing, either because the Hibs board believes in giving a coach time, or because smelling salts are called for whenever a pay-off is mentioned.

Equally, there was never the slightest
pressure on Mr Talkative to take the title, even from the "worst Rangers side in living memory".

That was Mowbray's unique challenge,
the context in which even a squad under construction was to be judged, and one which he fluffed up, royally.

Hughes, in contrast, was receiving all sorts of plaudits for his recruitment policy until the wheels came off. Those exciting young men got off lightly, indeed, in merely losing to Hearts. In giving Ross County an early Christmas – and in extending a farce into its 108th sell-out year – they exhausted excuses.

The Hibs coach says he can't explain what has gone wrong. Now he wants wagons circled – is that 4-4-2? – and a siege mentality. Perhaps he should remember instead that it is easier for youthful talents to enjoy a full social life in Edinburgh than in Glasgow. For now, our John is stumped.

Mowbray, on the other hand, never liked to admit that he was in search of a clue. He fell into the habit of praising
"performances" that were actually pointless rather than admit that he had selected a bunch of no-marks. Nor would he address a simply inquiry: how bad did Rangers have to be?

Mowbray's hiring policy has been pulled apart often enough. We forget, though, that he himself was hired, in part, precisely because he was thought to have an eye for the sort of player you can buy cheap and sell dear. That hope ended with the emergency acquisition, for English Premier League money, of Robbie Keane.

Yet bear another difference between two managers – or rather two boards – in mind. At Hibs, the habit is to hire someone who is young (therefore
inexpensive) but shows promise. If they flourish, they move on. But established talent is far beyond the means of Easter Road.

Parkhead has a very different agenda. The coach needn't be top class to begin with, but must be proven. The tradition began with Jock Stein and continued, with some spectacular blips, through to Martin O'Neill and – whatever the fans thought – Gordon Strachan. Where was Mowbray in the line of succession?

A confession: when he got the job, I wrote in these pages that he might be ideal for Celtic. We can talk about my finest hour another time. I was basing an opinion on what I knew about Mowbray at Easter Road, and forgetting a couple of non-trivial things.

Europe, for one. Five years ago, Mowbray took Hibs to third in the SPL – the summit, most decades – and to a Uefa Cup place. The upshot? Dnipro and a 5-1 first-round defeat. Compare, but don't contrast, his European record with Celtic.

Then our man moves on, as they always do. This time the lucky club is West Brom. First, he takes them to the Championship play-offs, then to the FA Cup semi-finals, then to the Premier League. Some people admire expansive football; other people predict relega­tion. Other people are right.

Yet Celtic chose to hire Mowbray on that basis. Forget the relative poverty of West Brom in the higher reaches of English football. Mowbray had shown himself, as a matter of record, to be no better than a Championship manager. And this was good enough, it appears, for Parkhead.

Perhaps it was, and is. Perhaps that's the real story. Celtic can neither attract nor afford the very best coaches, least of all the sort who would want to spend money on the handful of top players liable to give the SPL a second glance. Yet that truth does not explain everything.

Even with a ramshackle squad and incoherent thinking, Mowbray should still have got the better of the other lot, the ones who truly matter.

Had the roles been reversed, had Rangers found themselves in Celtic's current position, no-one would have been astonished. Mowbray "needed time"? This was the time.

Hughes, in contrast, has only an old Hibs problem to deal with. Yet again, there is a bunch of young men who relish the good times (in every sense) and can't cope with the hangover when the party turns sour.