The Vlad giveth and the Vlad taketh away

The last few weeks have been nothing but positivity and stability, all relative of course but none the less, positive and stable. Since the home defeat to Celtic, Hearts have been turning in fairly solid, completely uninspiring mind you but solid performances.


Clean sheets all the way! I for one will never argue with that, get your defence sorted out and solid and mean and the midfield/attack will feed from that - confidence in a solid defensive setup will lead to fluency and expression in midfield and the strikers will start banging them in. Well if you have got the players who can of course, the jury is out.


When i was a kid, Liverpool were my English team, no doubt seduced by the outrageous success, never going to get that from Hearts! Some time in the late eighties however i got bored with their machine like prowess and switched my allegiance to Arsenal. "1 nil to the Arsenal" suits me just fine when the need arises. I would be happy enough with 1 nil victories for Hearts between now and the end of the season, who of us would not?





The transfer window until very recently has been quietly positive, a couple of what look like decent signings coming in on the - now familiar 6 month loan first refusal on a longer contract if it works out. I wonder how many other teams adopt a similar signing policy, it is certainly not common in Scotland or as far as i can see the rest of the UK. From the word go, before the start of 2005 - 2006 season i saw this as a sensible even wily and astute policy. It strikes me that it is an almost zero risk means of bringing a number of new players into an inevitably volatile environment, selecting those who make it and dismissing those that don't with no real repercussions. This has worked for Hearts, with a good few players who have moved from the loan to the contract ( and those contracts tend to be long ) best example would be Roman Bednar. I would imagine Zaliukas, possibly Velicka will also move onto the longer term deal. Others who haven't made it are moved on, Tiago Costa etc.





Then came the long awaited and fantastic news that planning permission for the new 12,000 seater main stand has moved onto the next stage, with Hearts given permission to buy the required land to go ahead with the development.


We have waited a while now, this really has been the acid tests of Vlad's sincerity, his goals and ultimate plans and ambitions for our team. Back at the start of the season when things were once again going from frying pan to roundabout, Hearts made an official statement that plans for the new stand would be in by February. For me at least i have been accepting almost anything that has gone on at Tynecastle so long as that statement became reality. Close to the wire but this week saw us draw ever closer to the goal of a revamped Tynecastle park a home for our team for another 100 hundred years - i can't think of anything more important for the team.


One of the pics i have seen of what we may be looking forward to in a few years -

I don't hold with the argument that there is no point having a stadium if the team is crap, we will always be able to build a decent team and i am absolutely certain that we will have a better chance of realising our ambitions when we are playing in a stadium that lives up to those ambitions. This pic looks like the 30,000 seater stadium with the new stand and the corners filled in either side of the Roseburn stand. With a realistic head on that is where i would pitch my ambitions, 40,000 just seems too much of a leap to me - ask me again in 5 years.
In any case we should hopefully have heard the last of "flats flats glorious flats" for a while.

Things have been going in the right direction for so long now that the word "Believe" has once again entered the Jambo vocabulary. Long being the Hearts long ofcourse, which is nothing like anyone elses long and is a bit more like "a tiny wee short time".

So this week has been stable and positive on the run up to the seminal game at Ibrox on Saturday. It was with no surprise then that we shot ourselves in the both feet on Friday.
Valdas Ivanauskas admits that there are a number of Hearts players who have been attracting interest from others and that Hearts are in negotiations with those parties. Paul Hartley and Craig Gordon were then dropped for the game at Ibrox - with reports of football politics or football business as the reason, standard garbled English from Hearts.
It is not clear why Gordon was dropped, he has made it quite clear that he would be happy to stay at Tynecastle for now at least, so if Hearts are looking to cash in on his value it should not have affected his ability to play for the team. Hartley is a different story in that he may himself be Ibrox bound, so his not playing at Ibrox is no surprise. Selling Hartley to either of the gruesome twosome will upset and disturb many Hearts supporters. We have all believed that one of the major plus points of having Vlad around is his dislike for the Old Firm, their duopoly! Hence he gives the impression at least that he would not wish to do business with them. Selling one of our best players then to Rangers will signal a reversal of this stance and serve to reduce our belief in his oft stated lofty ambitions. If the deal goes through with Rangers, Hearts will have offloaded two of the Riccarton 3, one each to the ugly sisters. Regardless of anything else this can only be seen as battles lost by Vlad and Hearts in their war against the dominance of the Old Firm. More, from an objective viewpoint it can be seen as not much other than strategic errors on the part of General Romanov.
That said, Hearts have had the best years of Paul Hartley and i am not against selling him if the money is right, would much rather it was to an English outfit however. We shall see.

So with the media frenzy aiming it's sights firmly in the direction of the Tynecastle circus, hearts turned up at Ibrox for a game which would go a very long way to deciding the rest of the season for Hearts at least. A win for Rangers would provide them 8 points of clear water over Hearts in the race for 2nd place and the Champions League spot. A win for hearts reducing that to 2 points and game on.
It is a completely different Rangers team ofcourse, however it is perhaps telling that they now have instilled in their ranks two of the stalwarts of their nine-in-a-row years. Walter Smith back at the helm and Ally McMoist as his 2nd in command. During those years, Rangers regularly killed off Celtics challenges by drawing with them when Celtic really needed the win.
For Rangers then 5 points ahead of Hearts, a draw is much more useful than it is to Hearts. That said after a fairly dominant 2nd half by the home team Hearts were definitely the happier to leave Ibrox with the point gained and no ground lost, to Rangers at least. Both Hibs and Aberdeen winning has brought the 4 tighter than they have been for a good few weeks now.

The game itself is not worth dwelling on, a fairly even first half where quality was low and efforts relatively few and far between was replaced by a 2nd half of dominance by Rangers and rearguard action supplemented by hit on the break tactics by Hearts.
Rangers had the ball in the back of the net but Barry Ferguson's effort was chalked off for offside.
A couple of other efforts by Rangers came close but really i prefer to see this one as further evidence of Hearts meanness in defence than anything else.

Scottish cup next week, away to Dunfermline - i have a funny feeling!

HOOOO ON THE JAMBOS