WELL BUILT
We should be singing praises of Jambos for rebuilding club, not giving them a kicking for busting a gut to get game on
WHAT a lot of nonsense was spouted over the weekend about Hearts.
Here’s a club that should be held up as a shining light in Scottish football and all that happened was they got kicked from pillar to post because they bust a gut to get a football match played on time.
Yes it was hard on Partick Thistle not knowing if the game was on as Ann Budge and Co worked round the clock to make sure they were granted the relevant safety certificates for their shiny new £12million stand.
My sympathies were more for the fans than the players. Not knowing for sure if they would be travelling across the M8 until the morning of the game wasn’t great. I get that.
But spare me the anger from Firhill about their players. It was Alan Archibald’s job to prepare them as if the game was always going ahead, so it ought to have made no difference to them if it had been called off late. After all it happens every winter with pitches getting waterlogged an hour before kick-off.
So Thistle’s players would have trained as normal and they were clearly ready for the match, given they got a draw.
I detect a change in attitude towards Hearts in recent times and maybe it’s because Craig Levein isn’t the most popular man in the game.
He got it wrong with the appointment of Ian Cathro that’s for sure. And the recruitment of players over the last couple of years has been somewhere south of decent, although nobody can argue that bringing in the likes of Christophe Berra and Kyle Lafferty – proven international operators – wasn’t good business.
Maybe people have short memories though. Remember where this club were a few short years ago. Lying in the gutter bleeding to death.
“Blood doesn’t show on a maroon shirt” was the legendary statement made by John Cumming at the end of the 1956 Scottish Cup Final which his team won 3-1 against Celtic after he returned to the Hampden pitch with blood streaming from a head wound.
But it was spattered all around the cobbles and sidestreets of Gorgie as Hearts went into administration in June 2013. Good people lost their livelihoods and Scottish football very nearly lost one the cornerstones of our game.
Five years later this same club have just announced a healthy profit. They’ve built a sensational looking new £12m stand to increase the capacity of what was already arguably the stadium with the best atmosphere in the country.
They are now run professionally and with compassion by an owner who has been a supporter all her life. So the building of the stand overran on its timescale. So what?
In 2011 an Edinburgh City Council report said there was no way Tynecastle could be redeveloped and it looked like Hearts would have to move out of their spiritual home forever – not for a few months as they have done this season.
But Budge and Co found a way. At a time when Scottish football is supposed to be in a spiral of despair she’s built something special and kept the fans where they want to be.
Hearts haven’t always done things right. Vladimir Romanov and the proposed merger (takeover) of Hibs in 1990 are two prime examples.
But this is a club with many fine traditions. The manner in which they honour the servicemen who played for Hearts and gave their lives in the Great War is special.
Their commitment to charity – their shirts bear the Save The Children name instead of taking the cash from a commercial enterprise.
One of the first things Budge did when she came to power was get rid of the name Wonga – a payday loan firm – from the jerseys because it was an association she didn’t think was fitting of a club like Hearts.
There’s a transparency about how they communicate with their fans that puts others to shame, even when it means taking a kicking as Hearts have done in the past couple of weeks. But they got there in the end.
They worked their builders’ backsides off to get ready for Sunday’s match and for that they deserved backslapping. Not backstabbing.