Jocular Backwater

THIS IS A GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A JOCULAR BACKWATER. THERE IS NO ENTERTAINMENT HERE, NO FUN AND NO JOKES. JUST DEPRESSION AND DESPERATION.

Just in case you were wondering, there will be no warped entertainment to be had from this blog entry. Those times are long gone along with any interest Heart of Midlothian Football Club may have had in this seasons league.

As i sat in the stand yesterday watching two desperately poor and just plain desperate teams try desperately to 'do anything but get beat' the thought struck me that last year watching Hearts it was a mad tumultous roller coaster ride, with as many peaks as there were troughs, the cascade between the two being sickeningly rapid at times. This year alas the ride is only down and worse i can't even see the bottom yet.
Football teams struggle at times! it happens and it is clear that you have to hit the bottom before you can start to climb out of it and it is amazing that in those troubled times all supporters need is to know when they have hit the bottom. The merest sliver of hope, one possitive act or a decent performance is all that is needed and the mood can switch again to one of optimism and expectation.
Hearts have not yet hit the bottom of their trough, i hate to say it but i think we have a way to go yet.
More depression i am afraid.
The world has turned, there is a lot of disquiet, bucket loads of disgruntled Jambos, we are not happy. I have heard and read and blogged my thoughts on the mayhem at Tynecastle. Our owner Vladimir Romanov seems hell bent on destroying any good work he may have done over the last couple of years or so and the first of the 'sack the board' banners was seen inside the ground yesterday.
Vlad's other team Kaunas have now won their league in Lithuania and behold we get ... their coach Riabovas to take over (interim again) from ( also ex coach of Kaunas ) Ivanauskas.
This betrays the often mooted idea that Vlad is a madman who has no idea what he is doing. Vlad knows exactly what he is doing and so do I - Kaunas don't need Riabovas for a few weeks so Hearts get him, if this works and we somehow manage to pull ourselves together, Riabovas will stay and Ivanauskas will get his old job back at Kaunas. If it doesn't work Riabovas will go back to Eastern Europe. Whether Ivanauskas comes back to Hearts is a different matter.
This is a tactic left open to Romanov a tactic he has thought about and employed. It is one of the very few left to him since he has painted himself into a ridiculous corner where he and our beloved team have no credibility whatsoever in a football context. What happens if Riabovas doesn't work, lets face it this is a distinct possibility. I am not even sure any of us can determine what Vlad would accept as 'working'. Where does Vlad go then, there is not a coach or manager on the planet that would give Hearts a second look, they would run a mile. So all that is left to Vlad is his cronies from Russia and Lithuania and they are patently not up to the task and in any case he must be running out of gimps by now.
This led me to me to a previously unthought fear that has now planted itself firmly in my head, this has mortally shaken my previously solid belief that Vlad was good for us even if it is mental and painful at times.
How many young guys - 15,16,17 with talent and a choice of teams to go with, how many of those guys would choose to risk their precious future at Riccarton. All they would see amongst the turmoil is a bunch of big scarey Russians who don't speak English and have a tendency for management by fear. Could this lead to a generation(s) of squads coming through from Riccarton with no young talent from anywhere west of the Volga. That may be a bit exagerated but it scared me thats for sure.

The Pressley saga continued this week with more stuttering news and posturing on all sides. I just wish it would conclude now, we are all too bruised and battered to keep on with it all.

Pressley was on the bench on Sunday and hartley had the captains armband on. What can we read into that, i read
Pressley is being punished but will not receive much more punishment. So on the bench rather than in the stand and Hartley must be up with the script or else i don't think he would have accepted the captaincy and would himself probably have been on the bench.

It has come to the point where the press are styarting again to mention talk of consortiums and takeovers. How does this one work, Vlad bought Hearts for the princely sum of around £1.2m or thereabouts so how come the first number mooted to oust Vlad is £35M. Now he is fantastic but i don't think Craig Gordon is worth £33.8m.

The Game
I have always, without exception always, for as long as i can remember, always had a deep hatred of all things Rangers. Don't get me wrong i can't abide the other half of the gruesome twosome either. Rangers just pip it tho for me as the team i most like to beat/most hate to get beat by. Maybe it goes back to the Graeme Souness mid eighties superiority complex they built into themselves based on bringing in a pile of English hard men. I don't care i just hate them.
So suitably nervous about the occassion i sat through the first half dirge both teams offered up.
Rangers are under loads of pressure too, their French manager Paul leGuen has not had the best of starts and doesn't seem to know what to do about it. Another indication that winning in the SPL is not as easy as it may first appear. The Sun has an image of a guillotine hanging over his head, as a sack-o-meter. It goes up and down dependant upon the Rangers result at the weekend. If they had done the same with the Hearts coach it would ofcourse be Russian Roulette and the gun would have 5 bullets.
Don't think there was anything in the game, both teams are bereft of cohesion so the football was poor at best and at times desperate. Hearts were possibly marginally hungrier but Rangers had a bit more quality into the box.
The Hearts support has banged on for ages now that we don't play our best team and all the changes have had an adverse effect on the play. I used to and not that long ago either, i used to be able to take the team that was picked and then dissect it and come up with the correct team for the day. I can't do that anymore it is now so broken that nobody knows what the first team is anymore. Quality into the box has been a problem all season but believe me Barasa is not the answer to that and wallace is lost in his current role of left midfield/wingback.
We did however play with Hartley, Brellier and Aguair in midfield - we can't complain about that we have been calling for it for weeks, so why doesn't it work?
We played with a back 3 again of Berra, Zaliukas and Tall, i guess at least Zaliukas doesn't look quite so much like me playing football when he is at the back.
Velicka and Mole up front, why are we persisting with Mole and where are all the other 38 strikers we have are they all injured?
Which reminds me do Hearts have a medical staff?
A couple of efforts from both sides in the first half but 0 - 0 was as good as it deserved.

The second half was a bit better but i still thought it was poor stuff, Miko came on for Mole and got pelters from the crowd. I had to feel a bit sorry for him he has become the butt for a lot of our frustrations, he did not help himself with a comical effort at a cross which skewed way up in the air and in entirely the wrong direction. But for the most part everytime the ball canme his way the rest of the team switched off so what the hell was he to do.
We did have one chance, Velicka got through on goal on the right, shot low and hard but McGregor got down well to save. At the other end Gordon made 2 or 3 good saves to keep Hearts in the game.
I never felt comfortable and there was an air of innevitability about Rangers goal, a nowhere ball caught between midfield and defence was not cleared by Hearts and the ball broke out to Novo. He was not closed down and got his shot in from 30 or so yards, low into the corner of the net.
My immediate reaction was to blame Gordon's positioning. This to me looked exactly like the goal Celtic scored against us at Parkhead to win the league last year. He is the bestkeeper in the country by a mile but he can still get it wrong. As it turned out i discovered today there was a deflection and he had no chance. That'll be me clamped then.
We don't have enough in the tank to recover from such set backs so we sloped to the defeat rather than fought to the death to get the point back.

The Hearts support were guilty of booing Miko, Zaliukas and Barasa, this led one of our coaches to claim that the Hearts support was racist against the Lithuanians. Naw man we are crappist against crap players. If this joker thinks he can win over the support with that sort of nonsense he is sadly mistaken.