Bad day at the office

If the match reports don't make gloomy enough reading, I thought I'd add some more grumbles to the mix in the wake of today's chaotic fixture at Pittodrie. WHAT was that all about? Two red cards, a handful of yellows, players kicking each other, players kicking doors, bills for broken glass. Our players weren't just useless today, it would seem that they were also somewhat bereft of anything approximating Christmas spirit.

It's often difficult to get a real idea of a game without seeing it, and the chronic commentating skills of BBC Sportsound don't often help to make this any easier, but fortunately we can always rely on the 'colourful' Hearts World for some straight talking. Gary Mackay growled his way through the 90 minutes of play while the others merely muttered occasionally and whistled through their teeth at the antics of the referee. Oh yes, Brines - another one who didn't exactly cover himself in glory. Surely something has to be done about this ridiculous excuse for an official before he causes a riot? There are few referees whose inept performances are enough to have home and away supporters singing in unison about how awful you are, but he's one of them.

The increasingly impressive Janos Balogh excepted, it would be fair to say that our team just didn't turn up today. I grimaced slightly within the first few minutes of the game when the commentator gave a wry chuckle and flippantly suggested that the players looked like they might have overindulged on the old mince pies and appeared to be unusually sluggish. I thought it was just a slow start, nothing too odd about that, but no - this was the shape of things to come.


The defenders struggled to defend, the midfielders struggled to string a pass together and as for Nade, it's difficult to know what he did or didn't do as his name was barely mentioned in amongst the flurry of reports on neat little bits of play from Aberdeen's fired up mob. It was no surprise whatsoever that Aberdeen opened the scoring, and even less of a surprise that the goal came from former Jambo Lee Miller. It was just one of those days.

By this point, I would have switched it off and gone to do something less stressful like going through my credit card statement for December, but devotion can be a painful thing...I stuck around for the second half in the hope that Csaba's bum-kicking at half-time would be enough to see our team turn up for the remaining 45 minutes. Nope, not a hope in hell. If anything, they were worse.


So then, I got to thinking about the chances of 10 players all having an off-day on the same afternoon and decided that it had to be a good sign. Surely it then follows that they will all have an equally synchronised and simultaneous bout of stupendously good form next weekend? This theory might be the ultimate in straw grabbing but with a derby looming, this is really no time for permitting the gloom to descend upon Tynecastle and it's citizens. Had we gone into next week's game against our local rivals with a carefully maintained, unbeaten run, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have lost. It's the way of the world. The ultimate in footballing sod's law.

Plus, it's one game. It's not the end of the world. It's not like we lost to Airdrie. So I'm drawing a line under this one and looking forward to our triple whammy of Hibs/Motherwell/Hibs next week instead. I'm normally too superstitious to openly admit to dreams of taking scalps from both Mixu and McGhee in the same week, but there's nothing wrong with a little controlled optimism every once in a while....

www.heartsfcnews.com

Are we expecting too much, too soon?

It's probably never a good idea to kick off a blog with a moaning session but it's impossible to avoid one after watching Hearts wither like chocolate in an oven on Sunday when they turned out against Celtic. There's no denying that as football fans, we've been through the mill in recent months (or years) and the appointment of Csaba Laszlo appeared to inject the club, players and to a certain extent the supporters with a renewed sense of vigour. Progress has been made since the beginning of the current season and improvements are visible across the board, from the club's communication with the fans right down to the squad's team spirit, and to our surprise, we've even seen the press writing some vaguely nice things about us of late. Add a cracker of a derby against Hibs and a courageous performance against the Dons to that mix and you can maybe see why, for a moment, we were thinking things might be on the mend down Gorgie way.

But then we played Celtic.

I was full of positivity and superstitiously concealed hope before the game. I cast my eye over the news in the days leading up to the match and noted that a few of their key players were injured and bolstered this little seed of confidence with the fact that their recent performances in the SPL have been a little less than brilliant. I made my way to Tynecastle on Sunday with a spring in my step, convinced that even if we didn't take 3 points, we were sure to give them a game. I was oh so wrong.

From kick off, we seemed lethargic and disorganised. Our defence which had held so well against Aberdeen the previous week looked fragile and disorientated, our midfield which had controlled the previous few SPL encounters with such confidence was disjointed and sloppy and our lone striker was very, very alone. I'll exclude Janos Balogh from any criticism given that was rarely troubled by Celtic, couldn't have done anything about Maloney's goal and Caldwell's second was the result of scrappy antics at the goalmouth which should perhaps have been ruled out anyway, but most of the outfield players just didn't seem to have turned up at all.

Our lynchpin players such as Stewart, Driver, Berra and more recently added to this list, Bruno Aguiar, all seemed to choose the same date for their 'off day' and most were anonymous throughout. We perhaps only have inconsistent refereeing to thank for the fact that Mikey managed to stay on the pitch for the whole 90 minutes given that his discipline appeared to disintegrate as the match went on and his frustrations started to bubble over into his attempts to win the ball back from a greedy, ball-hogging Celtic. However, I was just glad to see that at least one of our boys in maroon hadn't completely given up so I won't slate him for that. The only other individual worth a mention would be Christian Nade who continues to look more like the striker we thought we had bought all those months ago. He harried, nipped, bustled and at times, seemed like the only Hearts player capable of controlling a football or making an accurate pass. Gold star for him, and I look forward to seeing his continued improvement in the coming weeks. So, yes...it wasn't the most enjoyable 90 minutes I've ever spent in Tynecastle and the only reason I really managed to stay for the duration was the knowledge that it probably really couldn't get any worse.

Post-match comments from Csaba were a little odd, given that he seemed reluctant to direct any sort of criticism at the players but I'm working on the assumption that his aim here was probably damage limitation of some description, given that his comments on the club website since then have been rather less kind. Understandably, Jambos everywhere will be gutted at the result, but reactions to the team's performance are likely to be borne of a much more deeply held concern that some of this current crop just are not good enough. It has to be said that we're weaker in some positions than others, I'm hoping to see the defence bolstered by new recruits in January and regardless of how Tullberg does when he recovers from injury, I still want to see reinforcements brought in there too. But other than that, I'm quite prepared to treat last Sunday as a glitch if we can get back to the kind of performances we witnessed in the weeks prior to that. Improvements are visible and progress has been made, so maybe we need to be a little restrained and try not to expect too much too soon. By Christmas, we'll know whether or not we really do have a renewed sense of direction or whether this is the shape of things to come. Seatbelts on, it's looking like it might be a bumpy ride.