Fight Club

Just a quick note to capture the win for Scotland against Georgia, yesterday.
Bloody marvelous!
I did not catch all of the game, best not to ponder too much on the why's and whatnots about that ( i was in HomeBase at Hermiston Gate looking at bathroom tiles ) Told you not to ponder!
Heard the first exhilarating ten minutes on the radio, just enough time to catch Boyd's goal, sounded like a cracker at the time and by the time i got round to seeing it, it still was.
Then i was stuck in HomeBase hell for the remainder of the first half.
My reward was to be chaffeured up to the Riccarton Arms in Currie to watch the second half.
On the way i listened to the overtly depressed, half time post mortem of Scotland's failings in the first half !! By then Arveladze had equalised for Georgia ( a fine goal itself if helped a little by some confused defending and basic auld man-ness on our right flank.
Struck me though that the rest of the first half must have been a bit of a mare judging by the tearing to bits the panel on Radio Scotland ( Gordon Smith and Willie Miller ( if i remember right )) were giving the team.
I was a tad nervous then about the second half as we drew into the car park of the pub.

The Riccarton Arms has the advantage over the standard local ( Railway in Juniper Green ) for football matches in that they let you bring your kids along. So when you have nowhere to bung them and lets face it these days you can't just tie them to the lamppost outside the pub whilst you spend the afternoon getting hammered, like you used to be able to do, at least not in Currie any roads! The Riccarton Arms lets you take them in with you.
Got the beer and colas just in time for the second half to kick off.
Now for me i did not think we were too bad, in fact i thought under the circumstances of injuries and suspensions ( McFadden, Fletcher, Pressley etc ) i thought we were pretty good.

Thought about how different the world looked from a Jambo perspective - this time last year - The spine of the Hearts team was also the spine of the Scotland team and we were in danger of strengthening that position into a bit of a monopoly. How very different things were now with Craig Gordon the only Jambo on the park.
The way things are going by the next time we play Georgia they could be fielding more Jambos than Scotland !!

I was interested to see Gogita Gogua come on for Georgia as Hearts had tried to sign him in the January transfer window - red tape being the catalyst for another round of SFA conspiracy theories amongst those who have watched too many episodes of the x-files ( me too )
He did not do much, if anything at all, though so couldn't come to any opinion either way round.

For me Scotland were undoubtedly the better team, Georgia had a couple of chances but Scotland played the more aggressive positive game and without being anything like the 16th best team in the world we did manage to create a chance or two ourselves. The best came from a cracking cross from the left by Naysmith right onto the big toe of Boyd, he should have buried it but he tried to leather it in and missed completely. Boyd was also unfortunate a few minutes earlier when he took an awkward chance to score really well, only to see it come back of the bar.
As the game moved into it's final stages i was struck with that spirit sapping feeling that we were not going to score, Boyd's back post thrash was the chance to win the game i thought.
I mentally went over the pros and cons of a draw rather than a win in terms of what that meant to Scotlands chances of qualifying - bonkers is it not! have i forgotten the football goliaths we have in our group, what chance do we have of qualification regardless of this result.
Beattie came on for Boyd and Scott Brown came on for Teale, Brown brought his energy into the midfield which lifted things a little and Beattie did his usual mostly ineffectual bustling up front.
With only minutes left and the game stumbling towards it's level end, Hartley found 2 yards to cross to Miller who headed back across the box for Beattie to collect on his chest and somehow sclaff the ball goalward, the keeper got to it but not enough to keep it out.

Scotland 2
Georgia 1

I have been in the Riccarton Arms to watch only one game before yesterdays.
Scotland 1
France 0
The pub is now my local for football games.
I stood in the same spot in the pub for both games, directly under one off their low slung oak beams. As the goal went in i ( as you do ) raised my hand in clenched fist delight and slammed my fist into the oak beam. Bust my knuckles wide open - looked like i had been in a scene of Fight Club. Done exactly the same when we scored against France as well - eejit.

JambosForever

Folks, the blog has merged and grown, Mr_JT has worked hard over the past months to come up with the rest of the site JambosForever.net which this blog now forms part


Lots of stuff there including club history and a forum for fans discussion etc

Check it out

The Mirror

"Some day your gonna have to face, the deep dark truthful mirror"

Elvis Costello - deep dark truthful mirror

An awful lot of people who had successfully been avoiding the inevitable view into the abyss had no choice yesterday. For most of us inside the stadium during that second half we looked long and and we looked hard into that mirror and not one of us liked what we saw.

We were a shambolic shadow of Heart of Midlothian Football Club a team in disarray and with nowhere to hide, a team imploding in on itself on and off the pitch.

Over the past year or so a number of supporters of other clubs have expressed their opinion, their consternation, at the lack dissenting voices coming from the terraces of our beloved football ground, as (from their perspective) Romanov rips the heart and soul out of our club.

"This would never happen at Ibrox ya bunch of spineless morons"

some blue nosed eejit

Well to that statement, i can reply now that the world is changing, there was a tectonic shelf shift at Tynecastle yesterday - the terrace was not placid and the dissenting voices were loud and very, very angry.

A seminal point for our club where now the numbers of non believers in the grass roots support is very close to critical mass. If the performance of the team does not improve and quickly things are about to get very ugly.

Talked to a Dundee Utd supporter on Friday, asked if he was going to the game, how he thought his team would get on etc. He replied that he would not be going because Levein has turned them into the most boring team in living memory. He was p'd off that some of their supporters are actually happy about this simply because they don't get horsed anything like as much as they used to. I can see his point but i can also see the others who are fed up of years and years of hounding's by us and just about everyone else in the league. He expected a tough, boring game that was just as likely to be 0 - 0 as anything else. Have to say i pretty much agreed with his prediction. The loss of Larry Kingston being the most important detractor to a victory for the good guys. Without Larry i just couldn't see where any of the football was going to come from. I was slightly encouraged then when it became clear that Bruno Aguair would be replacing him in central midfield. Only slightly encouraged mind you since he could hardly be match fit as he has been out for a good couple of months now and in any case he needs some mettle around him. That mettle was hardly going to come from Soli Mikoliunas, Andy Driver or the completely pointless Philibaitus!

So i fully expected a dull drawn out game that we might just squeeze a goal out of if we are lucky.

Time to look into that mirror folks, the deep dark one.

When was the last time you can remember when we did not play out a dull drawn out game where if we did squeeze out a victory it was not of the grudgingly annoying kind.

The mirror does not lie, we are rotten and have been all season.

There was a bloke phoned into James Trainor last night, an aged statesmanlike Hearts supporter who talked intelligently and lucidly about the reasons why he can no longer go along to Tynecastle to watch the team he has supported for the last 60 years. There was no malice, or vented rage or screaming spleen from this man, just a well constructed, insightful and undeniably logical argument laid forward to the listening public.

I will not go into the details of the argument other than it centred around the vanity of Vladimir Romanov as the central cause of the clubs ailments.

It was truly harrowing to hear this man talk.

The game ( or the first 70- minutes of it anyway )

Ok so the first part of this blog reads like a death march. You know what tho that game could have gone either way. There are only two problems to be dealt with - the first being the reason why the dug out did not change the shape of the team after Ibrahim Tall had been ordered off, until it was far too late? That is a question that we all need an answer to.

The second problem is the nature of the teams shambolic collapse under the weight of going behind. That is the mirrors reflection that we all see today if we are brave enough to recap that game in our heads.

The first half was off the now mechanically reconstituted standard boring crap we are forced to sit through week in week out. Very little of note in a positive sense from Hearts and the usual one or two defensive lapses that we just got away with. I was annoyed almost immediately by the referee and had decided inside of 5 minutes that he was intent on ruining any chance this game had of flowing anywhere. This annoyance, the ref eclipsed though, midway through the first half when he ordered off Ibrahim Tall for Hearts and Robertson for Utd. Handbags at dawn and no way a straight red card for both players - the ref lost the plot and made a mockery of the game. Hearts allowed this to affect them far more than it affected Dundee Utd however, basic tactical screw up on our part. The sendings off turned Dundee Utd's 4-5-1 into a 4-4-1 but Hearts allowed our shape to remain at 3-4-2 and worse we did not shift the back 3 around we just left a gaping hole down our right side?? Amazing really that it took Dundee Utd half an hour to exploit this fully.

HT

Hearts 0

Dundee Utd 0

Noticed at Half time that the concourse of Gorgie stand has been resurfaced with some non-slip, maroon coating. At least we won't slip in the rush to get out of this place i thought.

I mentioned to my dad that it would be just like the thing for these guys to score against us, that goal came in the 51st minute but my dad did not see it, he had already had enough and made for the exits.

Like i said this game could have gone either way, The goal came from a breakaway after a corner to Hearts, which concluded a period of some pressure we had exerted. They broke away though and used the vast open space that Tall had been marshaling, to advance into the box. A pass to the back post and a low drive into the net.

I don't think the Dundee Utd supporters could quite believe they had scored, it was a sleepy response from them.

Hearts immediately entered panic mode.

Jankauskas had come on at half time for Velicka who looks more like a first division player every time he plays - what happens with these guys? he seemed like a 15 goal a season player when he first got here. Jankauskas took this as his cue to start throwing himself around every time a defender came near him. More than anyone this guy for me represents the problems we have. He obviously has ( had ) talent, but he just can't be arsed he is here for a wage and nothing else. An overpaid prema-donna who is sucking the life out of our club, he has absolutely got to go in the summer!

Miko and Driver at least upped their game and made more direct runs into and around the box, one run saw Driver cut the ball back to Aguair on the edge of the box, he drove hard but the ball was always rising and missed over by a foot or two. If that had gone in, Hearts would have won the game!

Not to be within seconds a long ball forward by Utd saw their forward heading goal ward with only Goncalves in front of him. I swear i have never seen anything like it in all my born days but Goncalves actually managed to move away from the ball? he created more space for the Utd forward to move into? The gaping hole on the right was still there of course, now filled only by Utd's Robson, the pass to him was far to easy, he took it and slotted the ball home.

Now brilliantly awake the Dundee Utd support responded with much more gusto, now in belief that they were going to win against Hearts for the first time in donkeys years.

I just about got up and walked out right there and then.

Hearts entered double super panic mode.

One highlight and the only thing left for the support to cheer about was the introduction of youngster Glen who came on for Pospisil. Pospisil unlike Jankauskas has obviously no talent, he is and always has been simply an impostor who should not be allowed to wear the Hearts jersey again. He absolutely must go in the summer!

Pospisil was booed roundly as he walked off the pitch, his response was to sarcastically applaud the crowd. He has never really made it here, never become one of our favourites, for me that is the last straw for him, just get tae, that's all i can say to that.

The introduction of this 16 year old into the cataclysm of this match seemed out of order to me, what the hell were we expecting him to do about this and just what were we expecting him to learn - Look son, just so you know, this is what a team in self destruct mode looks like?

The 3rd goal was another slice through the Hearts defence with us on the back foot and all mis-shapen, i got of my seat and was heading for the exit before the ball hit the back of the net.

I did not therefore see the 4th goal but i will eat my hat if it wasn't just like the rest.

As i walked down from my seat there was a bloke who had climbed over and onto the pitch, he was screaming abuse at the Hearts dug out. He had his young kid on the pitch with him, the wee guy could only have been 5 or 6. He was screaming, very upset, trying desperately to haul is enraged father off the pitch. It was a shameful sight, i hope he regrets his actions today, he will no doubt get plenty of time to regret them because he threw his season ticket book onto the pitch as he finally left.

We go down to Easter Road in a couple of weeks. They will now be buoyant after their well deserved League Cup win today. If we have not got our act together by then ( somehow ) we could be on for a desperate afternoon that could blow our EUFA hopes completely out of the water.

So if not for anything other than a desperate plea to the sporting gods

HOOOOO ON THE JAMBOS

Just love football

After yesterdays riotous shambles at Tynecastle, i was in no mood whatsoever to go watch another game of football, especially given that winter had returned to Edinburgh with a vengeance.
Got to go watch the youngest play for Currie Star though and i am glad i did! A cracking game in the chill at Kingsknowe early this morning.
There were snow flurries and a strong north westerly for the youngsters to deal with and i will say now - each and every one of those boys playing in the cold this morning had more spirit and determination and love for the game than any one of those, for want of a better term 'bloody imposters' that pulled on a Hearts shirt yesterday.

Currie Star had the wind advantage in the first half and just like last week i was concerned and sure we would need a 2 goal lead to take into the second half. The lads used the wind in their favour to the full, pressing Beachwood hard back into their own half. The visitors were limited to breakaways, however those breaks carried a threat with their forward players running strongly with the ball. The ganme was poised for an engrossing affair.
First and second blood came to Currie Star, the first being a particularly well worked and finished goal - 4 or 5 passes moving up the park a slip inside and beautiful lob over the keeper - these lads are ten years old folks. It makes your heart sing to see it come together.
One of the Beachwood breaks came off and they brought the deficit back to one before Currie Star extended again just before half time.

HT
Currie Star 3
Beachwood 1

So the required 2 goal advantage was there ( just ), the game was very much there for the taking though so it was great to see Currie Star belie the tougher task ahead of them in the second half by stretching their lead to 4 - 1 early after the restart.
A period of give and take between the two teams then for the next 10 or 15 minutes where the game could have been killed off or brought right back to life concluded with Currie Star leading 5 - 2.
A victory looked assured and my spirit was renewed in love of the beautiful game.
To their credit Beachwood never gave up and brought the game back to 5 - 4 and just ran out of time to get the equaliser.

Great game today and a great win for Currie Star.

At the dentist

Hearts made great strides forward this weekend in securing their route into European football next season.
The InterTattie cup it is then.

Results went against Hearts with a defeat to Aberdeen, our likely rivals for 3rd and the Eufa cup spot for real. Rangers pulled of a great win ( for them ) defeating the other half of the ugly sisterhood at Parkhead.
All roads to Europe that Hearts have attempted to navigate this year have had diversion signs put up, firmly blocking our path to some sort of measure of success for this season. Last time it was Dunfermline in the Scottish cup ( a result which caused the first mention of the embarrassing InterToto from Tynecastle ( mind you do i think Newcastle care about that right now, nope i don't! )) . Now it is Aberdeen firmly slamming the door in our faces with a vital win for them.
This leaves Hearts 3 points behind Aberdeen ( they have a game in hand against Motherwell at Fir Park on Tuesday ) and 7 now behind Rangers ( they also have a game in hand ).

So most likely outcome for the end of the season now is -
Rangers keep 2nd and champions league qualification is theirs
Aberdeen keep 3rd and take the Eufa cup spot from their league position
Unfortunate for them but i suspect Hibs get beat in the cup final to Celtic and get their Eufa cup spot because Celtic have obviously won the league ( although by then it may have been so long that they might have forgotten all about it ).

Plenty of time to catch Aberdeen actually so should not be too disheartened but just now it seems like.
Last year was like being at the fair, going for a ride on the fastest, scariest roller coaster without being strapped in, and your naked!
This year is like being at the dentist, going for root canal work by Steve Martin and he took the drugs, and your naked!

Hearts turned up with Philibaitis ( isn't that some kind of skin complaint ) and Iveskivicius in the makeshift midfield - neither of these guys look up to the job. They appear to be part of the vast array of mediocrity that sits just under the surface of the Hearts squad and serves only to inflate the squad numbers. Here is a question though, we do have injuries this is true but these guys have surfaced along with Korobochka's reign in the boiling hot seat that is head coach at Tynecastle.
I think this is an indication that Vlad does not control the team selection as much as some of us think he does - these guys are Korobochka's choice not Vlads or Valdas's either way round they are the wrong choice.
Actually Hearts didn't really turn up at all.
Aberdeen got of to a good start with a well struck goal early in the game and seemed comfortable from that point on. Not that they really looked as though they had any more goals themselves but it was all too easy for them.
Notable however was Larry Kingston, he came to Tynecastle with a reputation for two things - He was a decent player and he had a reputation. A reputation for poor discipline, he has received a couple of six match bans in his time for losing the plot. From the minute Hearts went behind it seemed that every tackle he made was a foul, it was innevitable that he would get booked. With 20-20 hindsight you would say he should have been hooked after his booking but such is the dearth of playmaking capability in the Hearts team just now i guess we couldn't afford to take him off. Whatever he carried on just as before with his 1 to 1 ratio of tackle to foul and was sent off after the hour. Not to be curtailed by trivial matters like being red carded Larry went for the double red by accusing the referee of being a racist!
So in my excitement surrounding Larry, last week i stated the only problem i could see with Larry at tynecastle was if he got fed up with all the nonsense surrounding the place. Completely forgot about the fact that he might just be a head case.
We have had our problems bringing players into Tynecastle for the last 2 transfer windows, i have suspected that it has had a lot to do with how stressful and precarious it must look from the outside world to come to Hearts. Thats why we end up with so many Lithuanians on loan these guys are the fall back for failed attempts to bring in the guys we want. Or is there a policy that you have to be a certified nutter with paranoid tendancies before you get a gig with us.

It became apparent this week also that Valdas has not been sent to the salt mines afterall, he has in fact been so fantastic at his job as head scape goat that he has been promoted to Director of Football Bureaucracy in the Romanov Politburo. This all makes perfect sense? it is like watching some nineteenth century, moustache twirling illusionist at his mercurial best. It's all just smoke and mirrors folks.

Fine fair

Blustery and rainy start to Currie Star's latest outing at Kingsknowe this week, it felt like winter folks!
Warmed up nicely and quickly though as the game burst into action from the off. The game then succeeded in serving up highly enjoyable fair to the faithfull dozen or so souls who braved the weather.
Currie Star started positively using the wind at their backs to full advantage, hemming East Craigs into their own half for much of the opening period.
The goal for Currie was on the cards and came after 15 minutes, a welcome goal indeed but it could have been 3 or 4 at that point and i was worried. We needed to be 2 up at half time to stand a chance given the strength of the wind in our favour.
East Craigs found a gear and some space though and started to cause a few problems for the Star defence. They turned their efforts into 2 goals in quick succession to go into the break with a 2 - 1 advantage.
With the wind at their backs and confidence in their sails East Craigs kicked on quickly in the second half and forced their way into a 4 - 1 lead within 5 minutes of the restart. A real shame for the Currie Star lads as they had played well in a keenly contested and evenly fought match.
To their credit Currie Star did not fold under the weight of the defecit and played out the remainder of the game with creditable spirit. The lads were rewarded with a second goal with the last kick of the game.

A defeat to East Craigs but a great effort from the boys nonetheless.

I have been hunting around looking for the club crest on the net, found this during my ( as yet in vain ) efforts.
Looks well worth promoting

http://www.unitetheclubs.co.uk/Supporters/Clubs.htm

All we need is strobe lighting

Seemed like ages since Hearts last played, the interim period being littered as usual with more of the same disruption. Valdas has again departed, for? how long this time? who knows.
Initial speculation for his replacement came in the form of some complete nobody called Letiso? Have to say that petrified me. I have been working on this theory for a good few weeks now, that Hearts will be a better team team next year than we are this year.

"Whit!" is the response i have been getting from the non Jambo punters at work, to this unfounded proclamation "Where the hell do you get that from?". In truth my theory is quite flimsy, based almost completely on two ideas -

1. This season has been pretty dire really so can't get much worse.
2. The turmoil at least in part has been connected with now departed / departing old guard. So regardless of on the park merits of any of these guys the fact that they are no longer here means there can be no more disruption between them and the Vlad. In short those that are left are Vlads boys, if not they are gone.

This guy though, can't even remember if that is his name, seemed so bad, so lacking in any kind of pedigree that i was convinced he would be a disaster to eclipse Malofeev. Coaching league teams in the Faroes for gods sake, get beat 15 - 0, 2 months in charge of Lithuania, it all sounded like Staneyburn Juniors to me and my theory was shot.

So although we are still in disarray, having one of our backroom guys instead seems much the lesser of two evils, Korabochka gets the job for a few weeks, until - he makes an arse of it a Valdas comes back in for the rest of the season.

Another rant :-

I have had it reading the comments section on the Scotsman online, have you ever tried it? There is a core of about 20 individuals who regular as the day is long comment on the articles presented by the paper. Its mental, i am mental for reading them but to be honest they are much more informative and entertaining than the articles themselves. Anyroads there are a bunch of Hibees who are so bereft of anything to read associated with their own team that they feel compelled to read articles about Hearts and then comment about it, obviously in the negative. This rant is dedicated to those sad little individuals.

Right now and for the record i am going to dispel the myth, all the speculation that has surrounded the club shall be laid to rest. All the lies, half truths and exaggerations i am going to cast in stony grey granite fact. The most outrageous of outlandish claims to emanate from the Scottish sporting media concerning the team it's past, present and future merits, i will bring back to earth. I will staple them to the deck with a huge great restraining bolt to keep them down here so we can all see the reality of the situation safe from floating around in a fantastic, nightmarish dream. The spectrum of opinion shall be aggregated and integrated so that we can know the truth because that's what counts and here it is -

Hibs are NOT the flair team!

They just aren't and they are not the custodians of the beautiful game in Scotland, neither are they particularly young or particularly Scottish. Right now they are a bit crap actually, about the only thing they have a flair for is playing crap keepers.

Rant over.

Those of you who have read much of this blog will know that my relationship with Hibs is maybe not the norm for a Jambo, normally i prefer to see them win against the gruesome twosome for instance and i genuinely support them on the odd occasion when they play in Europe. By way of confession then i have to say i wanted Rangers to win against Hibs at the weekend, right now i wish i had had the confidence to think they other way round. Basically i feared Hibs catching Hearts more than i felt confident that Hearts could catch Rangers and steal 2nd place.

You are right i should be flogged for that treason.

The game

Away to Motherwell, last time Hearts were there we were at a low ebb and really really needed the confidence of a win, we managed it and it helped us to stumble along for another few weeks. We needed the same again, this time though to keep the pressure on Aberdeen and a distant Rangers and to put distance between ourselves and the above not so wondrous green Brazil.

There are times when you watch football that all you see is activity in front of you, no focus or direction or even apparent aim, just activity lots of it. To be honest most of the pointless activity was coming from Motherwell. But then just every now and then something clicks, a fleeting touch of quality, the opportunity arises and is dispatched. Exhilarating for a split second and then we are back in our seats and back to the whirling jig.

It's like this movie here, taken at Chambers St museum at the weekend, you have no idea what this is, it is all just whirling activity until all of a sudden the strobe light is switched on and it all makes sense, for a bit.

The person with his finger on the strobe switch was once again Larry Kingston, fast becoming the main man for the Jambos.
His near post corner midway through the first half was met by Tall for the opening goal. This was eclipsed by his effort in the second half to finish the game. Somehow he found himself on the right wing, scampered down to the byeline and crossed a peach to the front post where Elliott was screaming in. The header came from the defender but such was the cross and the pressure from Elliott the ball crashed into the net.
Could have been very different, earlier in the first half, Motherwell could have taken the lead when their striker was straight through on goal, he chose (wrongly) to try to round Gordon but under pressure overran the byeline.
Other than that this game was completely forgettable. To sum it up Hearts did to Motherwell what others have been doing to Hearts all season at Tynecastle, mugged!

Much more interesting is where this leaves things.
8 points ahead of Hibs, open water really.
Level on points with Aberdeen who we play at Pittodrie at the weekend
Rangers away to Celtic the same weekend

With maximum points from a Hearts perspective and spring in the air the chase for 2nd place could be well and truly on by Sunday afternoon.

HOOOO ON THE JAMBOS