Bum Bump ..... Bum Bump

Like most Jambos, i spent the week cussin an a hollerin, gnashin my teeth and wailin - barking at the moon mostly. A very disappointing performance against the skinny green on Monday night at home, has meant the season started with our Hearts missing a beat. If you had read some of the Sunday articles though, in the Daily Rangers for instance - you could be forgiven for believing that Hearts season was already terminal. Andy Walker just loves his wee dig at us, the tart.

Although i was all bitter and twisted about the whole debacle of last Monday night, as you may have picked up from the last ramshackle effort ( honestly i could hardly string two coherent thoughts together ) if you read it, I still new the season was virginal and the team was still to start.

So by the end of the week i was up again, dying for the Aberdeen game to come round.



Craig Gordon - The only downside to this that i can see is that he has not immediately got his move to one of the big 4 in the Premiership. For all his talent, he is playing for Sunderland, there is the distinct possibility that he could find himself in a real battle to beat the drop, worse find himself relegated into the championship and swallowed up in the huge machine that is English football. This could cost him his rightful place at the top of the game. On the other hand he could prove to be worth 15 points to them which may be just enough, after a storming season to take them into Europe and maybe a great run in the FA Cup. Lets hope so.

From my perspective, Hearts ( Vlad ) has done exactly the right thing. This is a stonking amount of money for him. Selling earlier and we would have got less, later and clubs would have started to look at the length of his contract remaining and begun to calculate based on that. This was exactly the right time to sell for all parties concerned.

No matter what any of the anti Vlad brigade ( Jambo or otherwise ) can say, there is absolutely no way we would have commanded anything like that kind of money for CG if it were not for Vlad's financial clout. He would most probably have been a Celtic player for the last 3 years, and we would have spent the £450,000 we got for him on servicing an unmanageable debt.

I hope he goes on to have the career we all think he is capable of and i hope as he suggested, he comes back and plays for us again -

• When he is 38 and in the twilight of his phenomenal career, full of misty eyed nostalgia for his beloved Hearts he must finish his playing career in the beautiful maroon and white.

or

• When Hearts are the most successful team in Scotland and he sees us as his best chance at winning a European trophy, we can buy him back for £20M which will be small potatoes for us.

whichever comes first.

Bum Bump? is that the sound of me landing back on Terra Firma?

Rant time - here goes

I can't remember which paper or writer, don't care!

The write up went something like -

John Collin's is brilliant because the minute it was clear that Whittaker was off he immediately pulled him from pre-season and prepared for life without him. Vlad on the other hand is a madman because he continued to play Craig Gordon throughout pre-season which is clearly stupid for a player you are intending to sell. Is it? Now what if, the reason CG was played was because Vlad was putting up the appearance that he was quite happy for him to stay with the club ( i am no hurry mate ), this being part of Vlad's bargaining position. Eminently sensible as far as i can see. The sale of both players was a coup for both of the Edinburgh clubs, why find a reason to knock one and hurrah the other. The only addition i will add is i don't think JC would have had much to do with the sale of Whittaker, and he seems the petulant sort to me so his dropping the player could be as much to do with that attitude as any shrewd tactical nous. My point is ... Media - shut up with the blindly pointless anti Hearts bollocks, there are plenty of occasions when Vlad puts us in a position of naked ridicule, so just stick to that instead of making it up when it doesn't exist.

So with The Riccarton Arms binned for the clearly unforgivable favouring the Blue nose v Chelsea nonsense over the Hearts v Barcelona game, i was struggling for a venue to watch the Aberdeen v Hearts match this weekend. I had heard that you can buy Setanta on a month by month basis from Sky these days so i phoned up the VirginMedia people and asked if i can do the same. I kind of can by simply cancelling the subscription at any time. So Setanta is the answer to the crap pub scenario.

Feet up, beer in hand and Heart on sleeve, I nervously settle down (if you can do such a thing) to watch the match. Surprise! but Hearts start the match looking confident and assured, passing is crisp and neat. Ball retention is therefore high and we look easily the better team. This can only be down to the fact that we are playing midfielders in midfield - 'i mean who'd ah thunk it'

Palazuelo and Eggert Jonsson in central midfield alongside Michael Stuart made a huge difference to the balance of the team. We were however still lacking fairly dismally in the last third of the field. Still we were well in control when Eggert made his mistake, a young lad and hopefully he will learn from it but he really should have just melted it out the park when he had the opportunity. The winger stole the ball from Eggert instead and cut back for Nicholson to dispatch the goal and the second time of asking.

Aberdeen 1

Hearts 0

Unsurprisingly this time. Hearts all but collapsed into their Monday night malaise after the shock of the goal against the run of play. Aberdeen took pretty much complete control of the game and my gills were becoming greener as each minute of the first half passed. The mental scar open again and weeping deep burgundy red.

We won this fixture last year, 3 - 1 i recall, Panilla scored a peach of a goal, but before we took the lead Aberdeen played us off the park, they oozed style and class for pretty much all of the first half in that game until we got them in a strangle hold. In this encounter however for all Hearts punch drunk performance after the loss of the opener, Aberdeen did not have the same quality at their disposal. It is early days in the season for them too i guess. With not much happening outside a constricted central third of the park and half time fast approaching, the single moment of clear quality arose to settle the match. A scramble for the ball on the edge of the box, it fell to Iveskivicius, a neat ball played into the path of Michael Stuart who clipped a great ball over the keeper and into the back of the net. Craig Gordon would have saved it mind you ! ( free now from reality we can loft him as high as we care to dream onto the highest pedestal )

Half Time

Aberdeen 1

Hearts 1

Bolstered by the equaliser at exactly the right time, Hearts went on to take control of the second half. Ksanavicius came on for Driver who had not done too much in the first half. It may be that Ksanavicius may take Drivers place in the team, he looks decent enough out there, provided a bit more penetration down the left flank.

Miko came on for Iveskivicius. This is easily the best way to play Miko, he seems to come on the park carrying much more urgency when brought on from the bench. He was even seen producing a couple of early crosses into the box!

Eggert Jonsson recovered well from his early mistake to put in an assured shift alongside Palazuelo who worked hard enough i guess but the jury is still out on him. He overcooked a couple of diagonal balls designed to drop in just behind the full backs - devastating if they come off, maybe he just needs to find his range.

The game never really looked like finding a winner and a draw was certainly the correct result, a tad more quality needed from both teams i think but neither should be too disappointed.

For Hearts we have a chance to build a bit of confidence and pick up 3 points next week against Gretna ( they threw away a 2 goal lead against Hibs - good grief ).

For Aberdeen, i couldn't give a proverbial mate.

HOOOOOOO ON THE JAMBOS

The Twilight Zone

This is a story, a very ordinary story of ordinary folks with ordinary lives.

An ordinary tale in an ordinary and ordered world, a world with rules.

The world i speak of is our world, here, the one we call Earth, a world which rotates on it's axis and in turns revolves around our sun. Creating for us the seasons and the passing of our annual cycle - this is the one constant phenomenon which allows us to comprehend and organise our existence within the confines of the passing of time.

We are ordinary folks whose lives are ordered based on that passage of time, be it controlling our waking ours or our working week, a time of rest. It may be the passing of the months and the seasons of the year - we naturally rely on that passage of time to understand our place in here and the now.

But what if that passage of time were to somehow stop! Or to rearrange itself! such that our understanding of the here and the now were to disintegrate - our ordered world would surely collapse into chaos.

This is the story of just such an eventuality, in

The Twilight Zone

Time ( supposition ) - 19:45 Monday 6th August

Place - Tynecastle Park, Edinburgh, Scotland

It may have been the start of season 2007 - 2008 but for all the world that game had the unmistakable stench of last season!

What has happened to all that time, all the things that i was sure would happen during the close season - the arrival of managers and coaches and quality midfielders who would enhance the team and turn it into something worth giving a toss about. Nothing that's what it's as if time has just bypassed the last 3 months.

Do you think maybe that my natural Jambo state is stuck firmly in the twilight zone? The aftermath of Monday night is simply a brief moment of clarity - a view of reality through the square window!

Of course i was excited about the start of the season, full of all the emotions you would expect -

apprehension and fear and desire and all the rest. But most of all, far and away the greatest, i was full of hope for the upcoming battles and sorties. The one great constant for all supporters when they line up for the season to be.

No blog entry for the Barcelona game as, curiously you may think, i chose not to go. I don't do friendlies they are invariably garbage. All teams need them it is true i just don't need to watch them. I did however shuffle up to the Riccarton Arms to watch it on the telly. Got in, bought a pint then realised they were showing the Rangers - Chelsea game. Absolutely f'n can't believe that and the pub is well and truly dumped. I watched 15 minutes of the game between what could quite easily be the two most disliked teams in the UK. Rangers could not get out of their own half so i was amazed when i found out they won 2 - 0. Stormed out of the pub in disgust and home to listen to the Hearts - Barcelona game on the radio. It was predictably garbage. Nuff said.

Before the game began i entered once again The Twilight Zone. Bear with me.

One of the main purposes of pre match warm up is, this is my opinion you understand and i have never played football to any level worth talking about, the main purpose is for the players to loosen up their muscles and relax there bodies and most importantly to allow the players to collect themselves, to focus on the game ahead. To coin an Americanism, to "get in the zone" ( not the twilight one ). This is a very personal thing with each player dealing with his own Psyche in his own personal way.

So for anyone who witnessed this i was initially amazed, a state which quickly froze into abject fear.

The Hearts warm up consisted of some trainer guy standing 20 yards in from the Roseburn stand touchline with a whistle in his mouth. He would peep his whistle once every second or so at which time a pile of the massive Hearts squad would sprint from the touchline towards him.

I mean for all the saints what the hell is going on at Riccarton if they think this is the way to approach a pre-match warm up. This is football not "running around on grass really fast"

Here is the unshakable vision that has been thrust into my head -

Unfortunately the best i can say about the performance was, we done a lot of running around on grass, sometimes quite fast.

Lets face it Hibs caught us cold, their first scamper down the left and Neilson didn't get to there to block the cross, Karipidis made a poor attempt at clearing from the front post, so the striker was in to nod home. If Karipidis had got to it the most likely outcome was an own goal in any case.

Hearts did have a game plan, just the one mind you.

The game plan was :-

Lets beat their obviously calamitous goalkeeper by lobbing him straight from the kick - off. He will of course drop the ball - His confidence shattered we will go on to score a bucket of goals and his Hibs career would effectively be over ( at least against Hearts that is ). Unfortunately Makalamby calmly watched the ball drop a couple of feet behind the bar, and continued to calmly stroll through the rest of the match - he must be wondering what all the fuss was about.

He looks a decent enough keeper but it is hard to tell when he was under minus 274 degrees worth of pressure.

The game plan shot Hearts stumbled through the rest of the game with a complete dearth of tactics or semblance of a strategy. I spent most of the first half ( a half that Hearts pretty much owned ) thinking to myself - Hibs are crap, they are rubbish we should be annihilating this garbage. But of course we were completely bloody useless.

In truth Hibs looked solid enough at the back but i think on this showing the have a big hole to fill. They seemed to flirt a bit with the idea that quick movement and passing is a good thing but without the real passion for it or the drive to make it really count.

At least Hibs at some idea where the other members of their team were, as with huge swathes of last season Hearts players look perpetually confused and rushed and well petrified whenever they have the ball. I despair, do we do any football during training? Do we just run our players into the ground, or onto the physios table more like.

Hearts played Ibrahim Tall in midfield, this has never worked for us before, the only possible explanation for it this time round is that Stuttgart are supposedly looking at him for £500,000 and Vlad wants him playing. No idea why Palazuelos was not playing, seemed so completely obvious.

As for Benuisis up front, watching a player simply die out there is never pleasant but it was Hibs for christ sake, the first game of the season and against Hibs. We needed with a capital N to win that game, we needed to do whatever it took, like hook him after 15 minutes when it was obvious he had no chance. We needed to do it and we did nothing.

Ksanavisius looked an ok player, out of position but might be worth a shot.

Michael Stewart ran about like a man possessed in the middle, with the same attitude and LarryK in there too, with some decent out's up front we might be able to start to cook but for sure it seems a million miles away right now.

Robbie Nielson was lucky to stay on the park for some mentalist tackling.

Miko has come in for his sizable share of abuse from Jambos over the past couple of years, some of it justified but for sure not all of it. With the Tynecastle faithful desperate for "Benny from crossroads" to be hooked on the hour mark, the sight of makela warming up gave us all a little hope. Makela was brought on for Miko though and shoved out on the wing with Benny left to humiliate himself in the centre. The round of boos was extreme and i hope Miko realised it was not aimed at him. An ok game by his standards but still lacks the final ball far too often.

As the game wore on, Hibs became more and more confident in the fact that we were useless and i am sure have seldom enjoyed an easier last 20 minutes at Tynecastle.

I have been quite scathing here, i am sure you will agree. In truth, i was in the pub before the game and mentioned - anyone who can predict or read anything into the first game of the season is a fool, it is always a lottery!

So you can discount every word i have written here, your time reading this was in all likelihood spent drifting through the dimensions in

The Twilight Zone.