Spartans 0 Forfar Athletic 2

Pre-season friendly, Ainslie Park - Tuesday 9 July 2013

Billed as: A chance for one of the favourites for the new Scottish Lowland League to pit their wits against Division Two side Forfar Athletic who were involved in the play-offs in the SFL last season.

Reality: With a Ramsdens Cup preliminary tie against Threave Rovers on Saturday, Spartans were keen on getting their fitness levels up. On a beautiful summer's evening in Scotland's capital city, it was a pity there weren't more people at Ainslie Park to witness a decent game.

The good: Both sides tried to pass the ball wherever possible - they both play on an artificial surface and this does lend itself more to a passing game.

The bad: Sadly, a distinct lack of atmosphere. 'This is Ainslie Park, Let's Make Some Noise' rather fell on deaf ears!

Reaction: An enjoyable game with The Loons just deserving their win. With the experienced Gavin Swankie and Chris Templeman, Forfar always carried more of a threat up front. It was Templeman who opened the scoring after just three minutes and while Spartans worked hard the game was ended as a contest with 15 minutes left when Muhsin fired in a ferocious effort which Spartans keeper Bennett could only palm into the net.

Enjoyable stuff and this may be the first of several visits I will be making to see Spartans this season.

At the Crossroads of Fate

 

 

The terms ‘Crisis at Hearts’ and ‘Turmoil at Tynecastle’ have been such constant companions of Heart of Midlothian FC in the last few years it’s perhaps surprising Scotland’s biggest club outside the Old Firm doesn’t charge them rent.

Ten years ago Hearts were around £24m in debt and then Chief Executive Chris Robinson was on the verge of securing – but thankfully didn’t deliver – a deal that would see Hearts sell Tynecastle Stadium in a desperate attempt to alleviate the club’s financial crisis. The main flaw in the plan was that Hearts had nowhere to go. Robinson was prepared to let the club become tenants of the Scottish Rugby Union and play their home games at Murrayfield which has a 67,500 capacity. Hearts had played some UEFA Cup games there as Tynecastle was not fit for European purpose but it lacked the intensity of the Gorgie ground and the prospect of playing run of the mill league games in front of 50,000 empty seats on a wet Tuesday night in November was hardly enticing.

Step forward Lithuania based Russian businessman Vladimir Romanov. With an estimated personal fortune of £240m, Romanov bought a controlling interest in Hearts and immediately declared the club would remain at Tynecastle. Romanov owned Lithuanian side FC Kaunas and as well as vowing to keep Hearts at the ground they had played since 1881, he shipped a couple of Kaunas players on loan to Hearts to help the cause. Hearts won the Scottish Cup in 2006 and split the Old Firm in the SPL to head for the qualifying round of the following season’s UEFA Champions League.

However, there was the other side of the Russian coin. In the years that followed, Romanov displayed a zero tolerance approach to the managers he appointed, wafting P45s regularly. His occasional outrageous statements about the SFA and the SPL, inferring they were corrupt and the media – he once referred to the press as monkeys - brought ridicule to him and the club.

Hearts won the Scottish Cup again in 2012, hammering city rivals Hibernian 5-1 in the first all Edinburgh final since 1896. Now, little more than a year later, Hearts have gone into administration with debts of £25m. Having now declared himself bankrupt, Vladimir Romanov has done a fair impression of former striker Christian Nade – he’s out there but no one is quite sure where. The existence of Edinburgh’s oldest and most successful football club is under threat more than at any time in the last 139 years. Administration means Hearts will begin the SPL campaign – if they survive until August – with a 15 point deduction. With most of last year’s Scottish Cup winning team having long since departed and the first team now principally made up of young players, the fight to avoid relegation begins on the first day of the season.

As bad as that is, the nightmare scenario is what happened to Rangers this time last year – the club is liquidated and has to start all over again in the Third Division. And possibly having to groundshare if the sale of Tynecastle is forced through by the administrator.

There is interest in taking over Hearts with three or four credible bids, including the Foundation of Hearts, a group created by local business people which, if successful will mean the long suffering supporters running the club. Fans have already pledged thousands of pounds to FoH who are in the process of converting these pledges to hard cash in order to submit a serious bid. The next few weeks will prove crucial to the club’s future.

Hearts supporters, as always, have demonstrated an allegiance to the club that is nothing short of astonishing. The administrator announced on 20 June that the club needed to sell 3,000 tickets in 14 days just to keep afloat during the summer months. Unconfirmed reports suggested Hearts sold nearly a third of that number in just 24 hours with the ticket office opening on a Saturday to cope with demand.

I’ve been following Hearts for 45 years. Having endured relegation twice in the 1970s, the cruel twist of fate of losing the league title in the last eight minutes of the season at Dens Park in 1986 and the numerous cup final and semi-final defeats, there’s almost an ingrained pessimistic trait to my outlook.

While the Romanov era brought two Scottish Cup wins - and last year’s hammering of Hibernian in the final will surely never be bettered for Hearts supporters – there has been an unease at how the reputation of our club has taken something of a battering. Now, Hearts stand at the crossroads of fate once more. On the one hand, administration and the real possibility of relegation from the SPL next year are blows the club may never recover from. If Tynecastle Stadium is sold by the administrator, it may well be the death knell of one of Scottish football’s most famous names. There is also an argument that Hearts might have considered administration last season and gone down to the First Division for the new campaign. If relegation happens twelve months from now there’s the prospect of facing Rangers in the First Division in season 2014/15 making automatic promotion that bit more difficult.

On the other, Romanov and his dictatorship has gone, the size of the debt, like a millstone around the club’s neck for decades may be cut like the removing of a cancerous growth. If Hearts can keep their stadium, with season ticket sales increasing by the hour, the atmosphere in Gorgie next season will be more raucous than ever with the fans believing the 15 point deduction can be overcome. Some first team players have agreed a pay cut and the sight of Gary Locke and some of the team at the Tynecastle ticket office today to thank the fans demonstrates the feeling there is for the club. 'Lockie' was always a fans favourite as a player given he is 'one of us' and he has shown more dignity in the last few days than Vladimir Romanov did in eight years.

 

The problem is Hearts are presently unable to sign any new players and the burden placed on the club’s talented youngsters may be too much to bear. However, if Hearts are under new ownership come Christmas and are still within touching distance of eleventh place in the SPL then new faces may arrive during the January transfer window. The cavalry may arrive – one can only hope they’re not too late.

Next year will mark the 100^th anniversary of Hearts players signing up to Sir George McCrae’s Battalion in the Great War, an act of devotion to their country that is rightly remembered every year. The sacrifice of those players is more important than all the games won, lost or drawn by Heart of Midlothian FC in the last century. However, it would be comforting to think Hearts will still be around to mark this important anniversary. 

One of Scottish football’s most famous anthems is ‘follow the Hearts and you can’t go wrong’. No one in Scottish football wants the implications of the opening lines of another famous Hearts song – ‘and now the end is near…’

 

Mike Smith

Twitter @Mike1874

 

 

 

That Cup Parade in Full

I enjoy living in Leith, particularly on cup final day. All week I've been reading about Hibernian FC's plan for tomorrow's, ahem, victory parade following today's Scottish Cup Final. Doing my bit for public service, here's the amended itinerary:

18.00 Bus leaves Edinburgh city chambers

18.05  Bus stops at Tescos to allow Leigh Griffiths to do his weekly shop

18.10 Bus arrives in Gorgie Road, where passengers ask local Hearts supporters what it feels like to see their team win the Scottish Cup.

18.20 Bus arrives back at a deserted city chambers.

19.02 Loud beeping noise as the open top bus reverses into the Lothian Buses garage.

As has been said annually since 1903 - better luck next year, chaps...

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Willie No Come Back Again?

‘It was rare to see so many youngsters playing in the first team together. As with most youngsters they could lack self-confidence and belief in themselves. What they needed was some old heads to lift them both on and off the park. They’re a talented bunch.’

Those are the words of a former Scotland internationalist who played for Hearts at the end of an illustrious, if controversial playing career. However, Willie Johnston wasn’t talking about the current crop of youngsters plying their trade at Tynecastle. In his excellent biography ‘Sent Off at Gunpoint’, Johnston was talking about the group of young players with dodgy 1980s hairstyles who were trying to break into the Hearts first team more than 30 years ago in 1982. One of the finest left wingers ever to play for Scotland, ’Bud’ Johnston was 35 years old when he was signed by then Hearts manager Alex Macdonald in September 1982. The likes of John Robertson, Gary Mackay, John Brough and Davie Bowman were the future of a club that was almost on its knees in 1981 before Wallace Mercer saved Edinburgh’s oldest and finest football club from oblivion. Three decades on and it seems the more things change the more they stay the same…

I wrote in a previous article about the sad demise of Scotland’s international team and how, in my view, things have been in a steady decline since the World Cup Finals in Argentina in 1978. Willie Johnston doesn’t need reminding he was sent home from those finals after admitting to taking a banned stimulant. The truth was he had taken anti hay fever medication which contained traces of the stimulant. He certainly didn’t take it to enhance his performance – Willie was one of the fastest players in the world and had no need to take any performance improving drug. As Scotland manager Ally MacLeod said at the time, perhaps unwisely, there was no way Johnston could have taken drugs on top of all the alcohol he had the night before. The bold Ally was jesting, of course, but the SFA viewed it as a serious matter and Johnston never played for Scotland again.

Johnston may have been nearing the end of a career which included two spells at Rangers – the first of which saw him score two goals to help the Ibrox side lift the European Cup Winners Cup in 1972 – West Bromwich Albion and Vancouver Whitecaps. However, Alex Macdonald saw Bud as the ideal man to bring his considerable experience to the likes of Robbo, Mackay and company, not only on the pitch but off it too.

Of course, controversy was a constant companion of Bud’s and I was at Celtic Park in March 1983 when the little winger was sent off during a Scottish Cup tie after an ‘altercation’ with Celtic’s Davie Provan. Johnston maintains to this day he barely touched the Celtic winger but the man in the hoops collapsed to the pitch and Bud was shown a red card. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing and perfectly understood Bud’s initial reaction when he refused to leave the pitch. To Hearts credit they backed their man and Wallace Mercer wrote to the SFA to protest at the treatment of the man from Cardenden. When two police officers at the game then came forward to say Willie had not struck Provan, the SFA knew there had been a miscarriage of justice and other than the automatic one match ban, there was no further punishment meted out to the veteran Hearts man.

Bud was someone who proved invaluable in the development of the younger players at Tynecastle at that time. John Robertson and Gary Mackay still regale a Bud story or three to this day and they readily acknowledge the contribution the great man made to their development. Yes, he could be a controversial character – but he was a character, something you don’t see much of in the game today.

As the curtain falls on a disappointing season for Hearts, it would be good to think today’s young Jambos could be influenced by someone who has done it all in the game, like the left winger who helped to nurture the Hearts youngsters of three decades ago.

Bud Johnston – Willie no come back again?!

 

Mike Smith

Twitter @Mike1874

  

A Presence on the Park

No one needs to tell Hearts supporters their team’s league results in recent weeks haven’t been the best. The club has put its faith in the youngsters from the youth academy and while none of the lads has let anyone down, I feel sure many Hearts supporters of my generation will hanker for the presence of a more experienced, combative type who isn’t afraid to make his presence felt. Or, to use football parlance from yesteryear, let his opponent know he’s there…

The more mature Hearts supporter will recall with more than a good deal of fondness Dave Mackay, Hearts legendary right half of the glorious side of the 1950s. Mackay was one of those players for whom the term ‘fifty-fifty ball’ didn’t apply - the maroon shirted powerhouse would invariably ensure he won the ball no matter his opponent. No one showed more determination or guts than the man they called The Real Mackay and he was the driving force of the Maroon Machine that dominated Scottish football nearly 60 years ago. Mackay left for Tottenham Hotspur in 1959 and many fans believed Hearts were never the same force without him.

I could hark on about other players from decades ago but, in fairness to our younger readers, I offer you the names of players from more recent times who had that ‘bite’ in a midfield or defensive role. In 1995 Hearts slumped to the foot of the Premier Division and manager Jim Jefferies didn’t need to be told where the problems lay. As well as recruiting French goalkeeper Gilles Rousset, Jefferies brought Italian defender Pasquale Bruno to Gorgie. The former Fiorentina player had a reputation as a hard man and even his appearance seemed enough to strike fear into opponents. He picked up more than his fair share of bookings and the odd red card here and there but this was due to his absolute determination to get to the ball before his opponent - by any method possible - rather than the popular misconception that he was a dirty player.

I wrote recently in this column about the fast approaching 15^th anniversary of Hearts winning the Scottish Cup in 1998. A key component of that successful side was was Stefano Salvatori. The Italian, who arrived at Tynecastle in the summer of 1996, was one of the first picks in Jim Jefferies’ side and his tenacity and fearless displays in the Hearts midfield had more than an unsettling effect on the opposition. Like his compatriot Bruno, you would bet your mortgage on Salvatori being the first to get to a 50-50 ball - only he had a slightly more subtle approach! Those of us who were at the Scottish Cup final at Celtic Park in 1998 will recall Salvatori’s dominating performance in the middle of the park that day, something opponents Rangers struggled with all afternoon.

Julien Brellier arrived at Tynecastle in July 2005 as manager George Burley set about building a Hearts team that would challenge the Old Firm for honours. The French midfielder was another who could hardly be described as a shrinking violet and his combative displays immediately yearned him to the Hearts support. The former Montpellier and Inter Milan player spent less than two years in Gorgie but in that time still managed to amass 23 yellow and two red cards. One of those yellow cards came in a UEFA Champions League qualifier in Athens when Brellier was booked for failing to cover an earring on the field of play  - something you could never imagine happening to Dave Mackay!

As recently as last year, Hearts had the spirited Ian Black in midfield. The  self-confessed Hearts fan played a vital part in the Maroons William Hill Scottish Cup triumph over Hibernian at Hampden and it was against the Hibees in a league match at Easter Road that Blackie famously pulled up his jersey to reveal a tee-shirt that read ‘I’ll Paint This Place Maroon’. Again, his combative style meant he would pick up three dozen yellow and three red cards in less than three years at Tynecastle but, in my view, Hearts midfield this season has missed his presence.

Of the seemingly endless supply of young talent breaking through the ranks at Tynecastle this season, perhaps there’s another Dave Mackay, Pasquale Bruno, Stefano Salvatori or Ian Black in the making. Someone who will make the opposition think ‘I’ll not mess with him’.

Much as we all love the skilful ‘tanner ba’ players every team needs a ‘midfield presence’!

 

Mike Smith
Twitter @Mike1874