How to break the Old Firm #2: Forget the horrible histories – you’ve got this, Hearts
Past title traumas might feel like a curse, but the conditions are perfect for a first non-Glasgow league win since Ah-ha were breaking into the charts
By Stephen McGowan
Silently cursing the gods of football for their Glasgow bias, Hearts have spent much of the last six decades as the nearly men of the Scottish football league.
Runners-up on five occasions, the Tynecastle club have mastered the art of the masochistic, pain-ridden collapse.
The last time goal average was used as a measuring stick to decide the destination of the Scottish league flag was season 1964/65. Had goal difference been adopted a year sooner, Hearts would have finished as champions by a comfortable margin. Change came too late to prevent the title going to Kilmarnock on the final day.
Fast forward to May 3 1986 and a Hearts side decimated by a pre-match bug travelled to Dens Park for the concluding match of the season, backed by 15,000 fans. Alex MacDonald’s side needed just a single point to become the fourth different club to win the Scottish league in five seasons. Lose the match, and it was still possible to become champions, on goal difference.
By half-time, pursuers Celtic were four goals up on St Mirren and the goal difference was neck and neck. A photographer shouted the score from Paisley to keeper Henry Smith as he left the field, planting the seed of doubt.
“Big man, Celtic are 4-0 up...”
“Bollocks,” replied Smith, dismissively.
“No, they are 4-0 up,” the snapper insisted.
“Oh, are they?” asked Smith. “Right, okay…”
When Tosh McKinlay went off injured, Dundee threw striker Albert Kidd into the fray. Kidd hooked his first goal into the roof of the net after 83 minutes and added his second before full-time. His goals had much the same devastating impact as exploding bullets.
Hearts faced Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup Final the following weekend. After days spent expelling their mental anguish, the Tynecastle players were given a painful dose of PTSD when Alex Ferguson and his assistant Willie Garner arranged for their Aberdeen side to be waiting in the foyer of the National Stadium when they arrived.
“Fergie got us there early and told Willie to wait for the Hearts boys coming into Hampden before the final,” remembers former Dons midfielder John McMaster.
“And the boys were told to say to the Hearts players, ‘That was unlucky last week…’
“They’d spent a full week with a psychiatrist trying to get that Dens Park trauma out of their heads and there was Fergie putting it right back into them. He calculated that their brains would be blown out by what had happened the week before. We had the cup won by half-time…”
Twenty-something footballers drawn from various parts of the planet, the current Hearts team are untainted by the failures of the past. The last time the Tynecastle club had even an outside chance of winning the league, most had yet to be born.
In 1998, a three-horse title race bore echoes of the current campaign. While Hearts were never fixtures at the summit, they hung on to the coattails of Glasgow’s big two until April, when a drop off in the final five games of the season proved calamitous. Jim Jefferies had spent months telling his players to beat all the other teams and cross the obstacles posed by Celtic and Rangers when they came to them. They couldn’t do it.
“I still think back to a game on a Wednesday night close to the end against Motherwell,” Jefferies tells Nutmeg FC.
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