Bring It On !

Ok, this is the last entry in this blog.
I have just and for the first time, read the blog from start to finish as part of this entry, in which i will attempt to sum up the season.
The first thing i can say about the entries in this blog is ....
Christ i don't half repeat myself alot!
It is clear that -
Rudi used to be brilliant and a lunatic and now he is just pretty good and a lunatic
Fyassas is fantastic but needs a zimmer to get round
Vlad is a mentalist
Vlad is the best thing that has happened to Hearts since, as long as i can remember.

This is now the lull, the limbo between seasons, at least we have the world cup to keep us sane over the next couple of months before it all kicks off again. At least we have another English, latter stage penalty shoot out disaster to look forward to. No Scotland and no likelyhood of there being a Scotland team at any World/Euro cup any time soon, so come on England - make an arse of it again, please!

To start with i have to say that this season was the best i have ever witnessed as a Hearts supporter! If next season comes anywhere near it we can all be delighted once again.
I have season tickets re-newed and just plain can't wait for it to kick off again. More season tickets will be sold so every game next season will be a home support sell out just like this one. OK the capacity in Tynecastle is too low, but 17,000 every week watching Hearts is a higher average since, probably some time in the 70s when the ground could take 30,000. That as much as anything else will ensure that next season will be brilliant.
This was also the most frustrating season i have witnessed - there is a lot of talk about what if's and if only's. I don't buy it myself, if i am really honest ( here i go repeating myself )
This is gospel according to me - regardless of Burley staying or going, we would not have won the league. We would still have drawn 3 or 4 too many away games. Pretty sure we would have been closer to Celtic and the run in would have been much easier but we would still not have done it.
So i am not tearing my hair out at that, the frustration comes from our owners ability to do exactly the most confusing, upsetting and detrimental thing, just at the most confusing, upsetting and detrimental time. The list is almost endless and is enough for a decade of seasons.

I was at the shareholders reception last night in the Gorgie suite under the Gorgie stand, had no idea but part of the Gorgie stand can open up to allow punters in the Gorgie Suite to look out over the pitch - all very Tracy Island and just not the sort of thing you would expect at Tynecastle. Talking to a bloke i was there with he mentioned quite rightly that Hearts had their best season for ages and Rangers had their worst and we still only finished one point above them. More than that, Celtic had one of their poorest teams this season and won it by a country mile. We should all accept that as the case and not get carried away with ourselves - we could have another great season, a brilliant season next year and still finish a load of points behind both of those two bloody teams. Right this minute i would say that it is Rangers who will come back strong next year, Celtic need to do something with their geriatric and abdicating midfield ( excellent ).

Anyroads back to the season just passed.
Here are a few brain dumps

Best Goal
2nd goal against Hibs in the semi final. Just pure genius. Just one second before he hit the ball i knew he was going to curl it in at the near post. Reminded me of another classic, Koeman free kick that knocked England out of some competition about a decade ago. Everyone knew what he was about to do apart from Seaman.

Worst Goal
Tough one this since there haven't been that many, it has to be Celtic's third in the January game at Tynecastle. Worst because i knew it was going to happen and their celebration was just far too vociferous the buggers and it killed us stone dead.

Best Game
Thats a hard one, the semi final has got to take it. The level of capitulation by the sad Hibees was almost painful, na it wasn't it was bloody brilliant. There is only one thing that whacks beating Hibs and that is abject humiliation of Hibs and thats what we got. We will need to do some serious stuff next year if we are to top that. Maybe taking Barca apart at Tynecastle in the champions league will do it.

Worst Game
Weird that a team, which outside of Leith we have beaten 12 - 1, should find themselves able to beat us 4 - 1 inside of Leith? The 2 - 0 at Easter Road, our first defeat of the season was Hearts worst performance of the season and the first sign that we were not superhuman.

Best Player
Controversial here my personal favourite of last season is undoubtedly Takiss Fyassas. He has just brought a level of superior quality to a position that Hearts and most other teams too generally find very hard to do. Left back, when have Hearts ever had a left back who was also a football player? I really liked Gary Naysmith when we had him but he was all pace. More than anyone i think Fyassas represents the step up in stature that the club has emulated this year, just plain great stuff.

Worst Player
Can't imagine what Beslija thinks he is doing for his signing on fee, but Petras needs to take it for being an imposter - not that i have seen that much of him but seriously, get a grip.
Hope both these guys come good next year but i am not holding my breath.

Comedy Moment
There are two stand out stunners this year, the first was the treatment of Andy Walker at a Dundee Utd game in the first half of the season.
It was always going to be something special that topped that - it came ofcourse as the comedy moment of the century, at Hampden park 10 minutes before the kick off of the semi final and has cast in stone the true sexual orientation of all supporters of Hibernian Football Club.
The famous slope at Easter Road was built in intentionally so they could all garden up it!

High Point
Did not last long enough and did not last even to the final whistle unfortunately, but i think the most euphoric moment of the season was being 2 - 0 up and playing Celtic off the park in that first half at Tynecastle on New Years Day - We were actually going to do it for an hour or so anyroads.
There is the cup run ofcourse, the semi and the final etc but there were two other massive high points - the win against Aberdeen to finish second and take the Champions league place. The other was half time against Hibs in the 4 - 1 win, At half time there was definite talk that we could go all the way and take them for 8, it felt great.

Low Point
That dreadful performance and acceptance of defeat to Rangers at Ibrox in December. I was shocked at how easily Rix accepted this as an OK thing to happen. Times had changed i am afraid and not turning up at Ibrox or anywhere else for that matter was no longer acceptable.

Best Performance
Very hard once again given that we have played some blinding football this year, can't keep giving everything to the semi final so here is one from leftfield and i wasn't even at the game.
That mental 2 - 2 draw at Falkirk, one down and down to ten men and playing them off the park and going 2 down against the run of play. We then come back with 2 goals to take a draw and maintain our unbeaten record. Thats a point that got us into the champions league.

Hero
Threw this one in and it is not even a debatable point really. If it were not for Steven Pressley Hearts would have been nowhere this season. He is right up there with all the legends in maroon.

Manager of the Year
So Hearts are so special we get to have our own manager of the year competition. Controversial maybe but I am going to plump for Ivanauskas, because he is the one who brought it home, the cup and the 2nd place. We were also playing with a stride again that was absent during the Rix period. So Ivanauskas is the man.

Vlad's Best Decision
To get rid of Rix before the split and give us a chance of making it this season. Even for Vlad you would think he was aware that more disruption at Tynecastle would be very dangerous - so it was a brave thing to do and he was right to do it.

Vlad's Worst Decision
One that really irks me is allowing the Andy Webster situation to have degenerated into the current impasse. Both for Hearts and for Andy - hopefully he will get a move down South in the summer and can pick his career up again.
There can be no argument tho, bringing Rix to Tynecastle was the biggest mistake Vlad made.
He also made a decision tho to appear on 'Off the Ball' and sing a version of the Hearts song, Vlad, that was a mistake mate!

Best Save
Craig Gordon made a few brilliant saves this season but his save against Rangers in the 1 - 1 draw at Tynecastle was out of this world.

Best Team
Here is the best 11 from the season ( it is pretty obvious really )

Gordon

Neilson Pressley Webster Fyassas

Cesnauskis Hartley Brellier Skacel

Jankauskas Bednar

Worst Team

Take your pick from Dunfermline or Livi, both were shocking. Livi got relegated but probably gave Hearts marginally tougher games than Dunfermline.

So that about wraps it up for 2005 - 2006, all ended on very much a high but christ we took it right to the wire in both cup and league - If it were not for the award of the penalty against Aberdeen or the Robbie Neilson challenge in the cup final the last few entries in this blog may have had a different flavour to the language. Thats football tho and we got the penalty and Robbie Neilson's challenge was pure folklore. So, thats Hearts most successful season for 40 odd years. If you look at the cup wins over time, we now have two wins 8 years apart which is about as successful as we have ever been in cup winning terms.

So all in all being a Jambo has never been so good.

So to the future than, Vlad seems pretty adamant that he has a dream to take Hearts as far as he can take them, including - breaking the Glasgow dominance, domestic championships and european glory. There are many doubters that i know, guys who sometimes appear to have a genuine concern for the well being of one of Scotlands most historic and famous football clubs, sometimes they just want to wind you up. They will use examples like Leeds Utd, once great teams now in dire straits, languishing out of the top league and gizzillions in debt. They will inform us that Vlad is not to be trusted, he could just be in it for the money, he will sell Tynecastle and cash in and leave Hearts sunk. Or he is just using Hearts as a stepping stone to some bigger club and he will eventually get bored with the provincial Jam Tarts and move onto some Euro aristocracy, leaving Hearts again sunk. It is entirely possible that any or all of these could happen but i don't see any real indication that any will so for me Vlad is definitely the man. More than that tho, most of these guys who talk in these terms are curiously supporters of the old firm, there is a sickness over there in the wild west. They have had it good for far too long, if there is one thing that i know deeper and clearer than anything - Football is about ambition, it is about improving and getting better and playing better and bigger teams in better and bigger competitions. If there is a single football club in Scotland or anywhere else for that matter that does not agree that ambition is a fundemental part of a football clubs ethos then they should be drummed out of the game - they don't deserve whatever support they get.

With the backing we have right now and the obvious intent -

For Hearts not to grasp this nettle at this time and make some effort to break the gruesome twosome, to take Scottish football and become the champions of it, then to go on and attempt the same in Europe - as far as they can, that would be a travesty - we must it is our duty.

As someone once said, 'The best way to make a little money out of football is to start with a lot of money'. So why would you, first of all in order to be a chairman of a football club you need to have money, love the game, be passionate about it and not care too much for making loads of money out of it. Anyone looking at that from the outside would see someone who was clearly a mentalist - i rest my case!

I guess i will only be 100% convinced that Vlad had only the good of Heart of Midlothian Football club at heart if and when the new stand is built! For sure, why would you go to those efforts if you did not want to build something bigger and better than what was there before - it would make no sense so that is the acid test for me. When Tynecastle is 25,000 seater stadium filled to capacity every week i will be 100% convinced. This is probably the only failure for Vlad this year, we were meant to know what was happening with the new stand by 31st March this year, did not happen and since then it has all gone a bit quiet and looks like nothing will happen until 2007 at the earliest, so hmmm.

Small point tho but we do need to see something coming together during this coming season.

A couple of new players that will add more quality will also be very welcome before the start of the new season. I figure both Celtic and Rangers will be different and stronger next year so we will need to be also.

Oh yes and one manager would for the whole season might be an idea as well.

HOOOO ON THE JAMBOS