What an engrossing thread this has turned out to be. A mountain out of a molehill if ever there was one.
We will never, ever, know the internal workings of our - or any - football club.
And one could on many occasions be forgiven for thinking that, on par with players' wages, they are crazily out of kilter with every other commercial enterprise in the country right now.
So this sort of apparently ham-fisted end to a long-serving player's contract could, on the face of it, have been handled better? Certainly, Mr Hibbert seems to think so.
However, let's stop and think a bit...
Here's the situation as I see it:
Tony Hibbert had a contract that he knew expired this Summer.
Presumably he was made aware of the expiry date when he signed it?
Presumably, he and or his agent will have made a note of that date in their diaries?
Presumably, as that deadline approached, one or both would have made enquiries with the club about whether it was going to be extended?
And presumably they will subsequently have had the joint wit and intelligence to realise that it was not?
Instead, we are asked to believe that Hibbert woke up the morning after his last pay day and was completely horrified to discover there wasn't going to be another. And no-one had had the decency to tell him!
What?
Really?
It may well be that the club did not send him a hand-crafted, wax-sealed certificate, in finest linen, beautifully concealed inside a Faberge Egg and delivered by a coach and horses to break the news to him - but are today's footballers (including the likes of our consistently average, if loyal former-fullback), so deluded as to think they deserve some sort of fanfare and 'apology'?
I would be amazed if the club's HR department had not fulfilled all their legal obligations and notifications to the letter, especially when such large sums of money are involved.
Yet here's Hibbert wanting us to believe that one day, without warning, Everton simply stopped talking to him.
Personally, after he and Osman got whipped in the 2009 cup final, I think he was extremely lucky to get paid for another SEVEN years.
He's been a crock for the last three, so even during that time he will surely have earned in the region of two million pounds or more for doing sweet FA.
Even if the club had been neglectful, who is he to complain after earning a genuine fortune and not having done more than a few days' work in the last 1,000-plus alone.
On that evidence alone, I would say the club have gone overboard to look after him.
We've got used to the likes of Ronaldo being a prima-donna. And even Yaya Toure's recent 'unhappy birthday' outburst wasn't completely unexpected - so cosseted are these vile, vain, greedy, self-centred people we invest so much of our hopes and money in.
But a second-rate fullback, who no-one has seen hide nor hair of for the best part of the last three seasons?
Hibbert, you should be ashamed of yourself - not sorry for yourself.
You have gone from being one of us, to a complete gobshite.
