Amnesia

No chance of this Hearts team remembering Locomotiv Leipzig.
Think that game was the first european game i went to.
Two nil down from the first leg away in Locomotiv ( some wee village in Austria ). At Tynecastle they scored in the first couple of minutes so we were 3 - 0 nil down on aggregate and facing the abyss. That Hearts team, although it did not have anything like the number of international caps this one does, did have have barrowloads of spirit. This was the vintage of Donald Ford and Drew Busby, Kenny Aird, Bobby Prentice and Jim Cruickshank, Jim Jeffries too. They turned that game on it's head and racked up 5 goals to win the game 5 - 1 and the tie 5 - 3 and sent Hearts on to play Hamburg, where we ofcourse got beat ( i never said they were world beaters ).
Was it 2 - 2 at Tynecastle and 2 - 0 to them in Hamburg?

After the Athens debacle i had promised myself not to expect too much, this was europe after all. If anything can be said about Hearts and this european campaign it is that we were niave. The final analysis is that we were summarily dismantled by two mediocre continental teams.
So i had not worked myself up too much for this game.
The coverage from the BBC started about 30s into the game. The game started early but it is weird that the coverage from the BBC for UEFA cup games does not include any build up at all.
Prague were playing in maroon and one of their players is the spitting image of Paul Hartley, long hair ond dodgy beard et al. This resulted in my complete disorientation for the first minute or two until i got to grips with things and realised we were in white. The Hearts team suffered the same disorientation at the beginning of the game, but theirs lasted for about 20 minutes.
In that first 20 minutes Prague hit Hearts hard, the game could have been well and truly over. Within 15 minutes, Gordon had made at least 3 goal bound saves, they had hit the bar and Hartley saved off the line. We were in real trouble! It is curious tho that Each of these efforts carried a bit of fortune, all being helped on by deflections and balls bouncing around in the box. The only time they really hasd us undone was a free header at the back post that they really should have scored with, their man heading a foot or so wide.
So we were 2 - 0 down from the first leg, away from home and getting pummeled, at least we can say that we turned things around a bit in this game, can we? We did manage to take some level of control in this game and we didn't lose any goals or players for that matter so i guess thats a bit possitive. I don't really believe this tho, it is pretty clear that Prague's tactics were pretty much -
Lets see if we can start hard and fast and finish this team in the first 20 minutes
If that doesn't work
Lets sit back and play it tight and play out this game
So for me Prague allowed us into this game as much as we muscled our way into it.
There in lies the rub, i can't be too critical of the team ( maybe i can, i might get more critical as this blog goes on ). It has been screamingly evident this year that if Hearts are faced with a good solid well organised compact team, we can't break them down. We are frustratingly inept at breaking that sort of team down.
So Prague try and kill us off, don't quite manage it and then sit back a bit and get solid and organised and compact, because they know that we will really struggle to break through and get the goals we need.
So if we can't break down Falkirk and St Mirren etc then why do we think we will be able to break down the current leaders of the Czech league and a team that has spent most of the last decade playing in the Champions League. Pretty obvious really, ofcourse we couldn't.
A speculative cross field ball from Wallace which had more than a smattering of route one football about it caused a bit of panic in the Prague defence, Mole collected and the keeper lunged at him ( should he have gone down, i think there Jamie Mole in a couple of years will do ), Mole got caught in two minds and the chance was lost. This did have the effect tho of planting the idea into the Hearts team that route one football was an option. For the rest of the half the chances Hearts did get came from that most basic of tactics. The best of these was a looping ball that was not dealt with by the Prague defence, just didn't come down quick enough for Chesnauskis, his volley flying over. Maybe he snatched at it a bit but i thought it was a hard chance to take.
Half time and it is

Prague 0 Hearts 0

Really good work by Panilla to force the Prague centre half into making a mistake, passing the ball into the path of Mole, opened up the second half with the chance of the game, the chance of the tie and the chance of our European campaign. Mole took it and from 18 yards out attempted to stroke the ball round the keeper - the perfect height for the keeper he saved and the chance was gone.
We will never know if things would have been different had that chance gone in so no point speculating. The effect it had on us was to deflate rather than inflate and inspire and there you go - Hearts in a nut shell.

Substitutes

Nielson - Right then i have been banging my gums about this for ages so time for me to shut up. Nielson started this game and is therefore Ivanauskas's first choice right back. I am wrong in my speculation that Nielson will lose his first team place this year. Robbie was replaced by Tall with about 25 minutes to go. Lots of people have been wondering about that one but i thought it was OK, i do think Tall provides a bit more of a threat going forward and with a final push on it was wise to have a fresh pair of legs at the back.

Mole - Bednar came on for Mole in a straight forward swap, so no questions there but not sure if Bednar is cutting it at all these days.

Panilla - Panilla looks the best we have up front at the moment but i think he was probably out on his feet, but bringing on Aguair for him was madness. It was meant to shore up the midfield allowing Chesnauskis and Miko to move up into a front 3. Just plain didn't work, mostly because there were only a few minutes left, absolutely bloody stupid, if this was a plan and it might have been then it should have been implemented with 20 minutes to go at least. Maybe Ivanauskis had in the back of his mind the unsettling effect his double substitution had on the team in the first leg and didn't want to have 2 substitutions so close together.

The worst thing about the whole affair is that the game just peterred out, as the half wore on the chances dried up and in the end we just accepted our fate.
There was no desperation and no passion, no maniacal struggle to remain in the competition even it that led to a defeat. I am not saying the team didn't try they just didn't believe in themselves. We need to get it back, hopefully we will have some small catharsis against Dundee Utd tomorrow, they will come and try to stop us playing but i will stop short at them being organised and compact, so i expect us to win.
We all want and need us to win comfortably and with some style.

So

HOOO On the Jambos

One last thought, given the colour they play in - for the rest of this years UEFA cup

HOO On the Sparta