The Twilight Zone

This is a story, a very ordinary story of ordinary folks with ordinary lives.

An ordinary tale in an ordinary and ordered world, a world with rules.

The world i speak of is our world, here, the one we call Earth, a world which rotates on it's axis and in turns revolves around our sun. Creating for us the seasons and the passing of our annual cycle - this is the one constant phenomenon which allows us to comprehend and organise our existence within the confines of the passing of time.

We are ordinary folks whose lives are ordered based on that passage of time, be it controlling our waking ours or our working week, a time of rest. It may be the passing of the months and the seasons of the year - we naturally rely on that passage of time to understand our place in here and the now.

But what if that passage of time were to somehow stop! Or to rearrange itself! such that our understanding of the here and the now were to disintegrate - our ordered world would surely collapse into chaos.

This is the story of just such an eventuality, in

The Twilight Zone

Time ( supposition ) - 19:45 Monday 6th August

Place - Tynecastle Park, Edinburgh, Scotland

It may have been the start of season 2007 - 2008 but for all the world that game had the unmistakable stench of last season!

What has happened to all that time, all the things that i was sure would happen during the close season - the arrival of managers and coaches and quality midfielders who would enhance the team and turn it into something worth giving a toss about. Nothing that's what it's as if time has just bypassed the last 3 months.

Do you think maybe that my natural Jambo state is stuck firmly in the twilight zone? The aftermath of Monday night is simply a brief moment of clarity - a view of reality through the square window!

Of course i was excited about the start of the season, full of all the emotions you would expect -

apprehension and fear and desire and all the rest. But most of all, far and away the greatest, i was full of hope for the upcoming battles and sorties. The one great constant for all supporters when they line up for the season to be.

No blog entry for the Barcelona game as, curiously you may think, i chose not to go. I don't do friendlies they are invariably garbage. All teams need them it is true i just don't need to watch them. I did however shuffle up to the Riccarton Arms to watch it on the telly. Got in, bought a pint then realised they were showing the Rangers - Chelsea game. Absolutely f'n can't believe that and the pub is well and truly dumped. I watched 15 minutes of the game between what could quite easily be the two most disliked teams in the UK. Rangers could not get out of their own half so i was amazed when i found out they won 2 - 0. Stormed out of the pub in disgust and home to listen to the Hearts - Barcelona game on the radio. It was predictably garbage. Nuff said.

Before the game began i entered once again The Twilight Zone. Bear with me.

One of the main purposes of pre match warm up is, this is my opinion you understand and i have never played football to any level worth talking about, the main purpose is for the players to loosen up their muscles and relax there bodies and most importantly to allow the players to collect themselves, to focus on the game ahead. To coin an Americanism, to "get in the zone" ( not the twilight one ). This is a very personal thing with each player dealing with his own Psyche in his own personal way.

So for anyone who witnessed this i was initially amazed, a state which quickly froze into abject fear.

The Hearts warm up consisted of some trainer guy standing 20 yards in from the Roseburn stand touchline with a whistle in his mouth. He would peep his whistle once every second or so at which time a pile of the massive Hearts squad would sprint from the touchline towards him.

I mean for all the saints what the hell is going on at Riccarton if they think this is the way to approach a pre-match warm up. This is football not "running around on grass really fast"

Here is the unshakable vision that has been thrust into my head -

Unfortunately the best i can say about the performance was, we done a lot of running around on grass, sometimes quite fast.

Lets face it Hibs caught us cold, their first scamper down the left and Neilson didn't get to there to block the cross, Karipidis made a poor attempt at clearing from the front post, so the striker was in to nod home. If Karipidis had got to it the most likely outcome was an own goal in any case.

Hearts did have a game plan, just the one mind you.

The game plan was :-

Lets beat their obviously calamitous goalkeeper by lobbing him straight from the kick - off. He will of course drop the ball - His confidence shattered we will go on to score a bucket of goals and his Hibs career would effectively be over ( at least against Hearts that is ). Unfortunately Makalamby calmly watched the ball drop a couple of feet behind the bar, and continued to calmly stroll through the rest of the match - he must be wondering what all the fuss was about.

He looks a decent enough keeper but it is hard to tell when he was under minus 274 degrees worth of pressure.

The game plan shot Hearts stumbled through the rest of the game with a complete dearth of tactics or semblance of a strategy. I spent most of the first half ( a half that Hearts pretty much owned ) thinking to myself - Hibs are crap, they are rubbish we should be annihilating this garbage. But of course we were completely bloody useless.

In truth Hibs looked solid enough at the back but i think on this showing the have a big hole to fill. They seemed to flirt a bit with the idea that quick movement and passing is a good thing but without the real passion for it or the drive to make it really count.

At least Hibs at some idea where the other members of their team were, as with huge swathes of last season Hearts players look perpetually confused and rushed and well petrified whenever they have the ball. I despair, do we do any football during training? Do we just run our players into the ground, or onto the physios table more like.

Hearts played Ibrahim Tall in midfield, this has never worked for us before, the only possible explanation for it this time round is that Stuttgart are supposedly looking at him for £500,000 and Vlad wants him playing. No idea why Palazuelos was not playing, seemed so completely obvious.

As for Benuisis up front, watching a player simply die out there is never pleasant but it was Hibs for christ sake, the first game of the season and against Hibs. We needed with a capital N to win that game, we needed to do whatever it took, like hook him after 15 minutes when it was obvious he had no chance. We needed to do it and we did nothing.

Ksanavisius looked an ok player, out of position but might be worth a shot.

Michael Stewart ran about like a man possessed in the middle, with the same attitude and LarryK in there too, with some decent out's up front we might be able to start to cook but for sure it seems a million miles away right now.

Robbie Nielson was lucky to stay on the park for some mentalist tackling.

Miko has come in for his sizable share of abuse from Jambos over the past couple of years, some of it justified but for sure not all of it. With the Tynecastle faithful desperate for "Benny from crossroads" to be hooked on the hour mark, the sight of makela warming up gave us all a little hope. Makela was brought on for Miko though and shoved out on the wing with Benny left to humiliate himself in the centre. The round of boos was extreme and i hope Miko realised it was not aimed at him. An ok game by his standards but still lacks the final ball far too often.

As the game wore on, Hibs became more and more confident in the fact that we were useless and i am sure have seldom enjoyed an easier last 20 minutes at Tynecastle.

I have been quite scathing here, i am sure you will agree. In truth, i was in the pub before the game and mentioned - anyone who can predict or read anything into the first game of the season is a fool, it is always a lottery!

So you can discount every word i have written here, your time reading this was in all likelihood spent drifting through the dimensions in

The Twilight Zone.