The Slow Match Report: Hearts 2 Rangers 1
Last Christmas, Hearts gave us a bleak draw with Moldovan minnows. This year, they're streaking ahead of their domestic rivals... even Sir Walter Scott couldn't have made it up
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Up close to where Walter Scott sat distinctly unamused by the blazing festivities surrounding him, an old couple kissed goodbye for now. The woman straightened her man’s maroon and white scarf and despatched him onto the number one bus. He was going for an afternoon with his other true love, and she was fine with that. As a million partners well know, bigamy is part of the deal when you chuck your lot in with someone who measures their years from August to May. He looked like the kind of Edinburgh man who could see Dave Mackay when he closed his eyes.
At each stop on the way to Gorgie, the bus gathered more Jambos. Many wore the expressions of stevedores at the shift end gates or prisoners sniffing free air for the first time in years. They had escaped the predictable traumas of festive preparation for the volatile splendour of a football match. “What are you up to for Christmas?” and “Bought all your presents, then?” had given way to “Why’s Halkett not playing?” and “Are you off to Dundee away?” Condensation veiled the windows of the Gorgie Fish Bar and in the queue thoughts of salt and sauce had them salivating more than they ever would for parsnips and sprouts.
‘Santa is a Gorgie Boy’ declared a scarf hanging from the Murieston Lane merchandise stall. This year seems a wise one for the big man to swap red robes for something closer to maroon. Those of us who were at a fractious Tynecastle one year ago for a draw with Petrocub Hîncești of Moldova should be astonished with the turnaround. However, one great treat of this game of ours is its capacity for rapidly veering fortunes. Men that booed vigorously last December and cursed being born in the Gorgie way now contemplated tattoos of Derek McInnes’ face and wished Cláudio Braga would marry their daughter.
Within the citadel walls of Tynecastle Park, all the carol singers trilled at once. Whether Wheatfield Stand or Roseburn or Main or Gorgie, in guttural terms they let the world know that this was their story, this was their song. Quite marvellously, there emerged a few seconds’ delay between each stand’s rendition, making for an echo that surely chilled the suddenly skeletal Rangers players in their Sunkist-orange strips. It was an aural battering ram from a choir gone rogue.
Early on, Rangers passed the ball around soporifically as if trying to lull their opponents into slumber, a one-touch and side-foot lullaby. When they did quicken the pace, Hearts pursued them with the studied voraciousness of street pigeons hunting Greggs crumbs. It seemed impolite when suddenly the away side scored from a corner, Emmanuel Fernandez popping goalwards a header which Bojan Miovski plinked into the net. Gers manager Danny Röhl smiled gently towards the away support without lifting a fist, maintaining the demeanour of an amiable deputy headmaster on exam results day. VAR intervened, suppressing us all with a long delay in which damned thoughts of presents to wrap and disliked uncles temporarily encroached. No goal, and the first maroon roar of the day.
It was at this point, 10 minutes in, that Hearts midfielder Cammy Devlin’s festering intolerance towards his team’s lack of dominance brimmed into all-out hostility. The Australian began his crackdown on sloppiness with a series of quick motivational speeches to individual teammates, a preacher with a train to catch. Then, he decided that the ball was now an artefact to be cherished and protected at all costs. For the rest of the afternoon, he seemed to control the match as if it were a dog on a lead. Devlin mopped, poked, irked, probed and teased. He was the stitching in the patchwork quilt. If the moon had fallen from the sky, he would’ve trapped it and punted it to safety. Championship titles derive from lungs and feet like his.
Undoubtedly spurred by his own searing therapy session, Alexandros Kyziridis now ran with the ball as if he were a match struck alight. This Medusa of the wing petrified Rangers defenders solid and pummelled two shots inches wide. Then, ten minutes before half-time he tapped a short corner to his fellow bewitcher, Braga. The Portuguese backheeled the return, Kyziridis cast in a cross and Stuart Findlay thwacked home with his forehead. Tynecastle was volcanic, berserk. Somewhere in Lapland, Santa opened another can.
Not long afterwards, Rangers captain James Tavernier fell over while taking a free-kick as if wrestled by a ghost. In mitigation, he looked to his studs. Hearts had blood in their noses, players snapping into everything, crowd baying ravenously. The maroon pack wished to eviscerate their prey. Heeding the visceral message, Findlay drooped a long ball forward. Oisin McEntee climbed as if trying to see something sensational over a wall and nodded to Braga. The Portuguese flicked elegantly to Lawrence Shankland, wide of the six-yard box. Surely he would control and seek a more profitable corridor to goal, or tickle the ball back to Braga. Such suppositions are one reason why most of us are in the stands and only a chosen few elevated to the turf. Shankland drummed a shot that did not just beat Jack Butland at his near post but demoralised him too. For the second time in under 10 minutes, Gorgie was louder than war. Butland looked like he had mistakenly thrown a tenner into a wishing well. Half-time gave him and Rangers a place to hide.
At the start of the second period they roused a little, though more with the hunched shoulders of groggy teenagers than any great vigour. Whenever they came close to talking coherently Devlin finished their sentences for them. Hearts still possessed all the best lines. When Braga, Kyziridis, Shankland and Tomas Magnusson swept forward in a pivoted line it brought to mind geese gliding majestically through the sky. Shankland should have scored at least one more and could be seen shouting angrily, hungrily at the darkening sky. Rangers, meanwhile, made an absurdist habit of passing the ball out of play or worse. After finally winning a corner, taker Connor Barron discharged the ball so far over his teammates’ heads that it set Hearts on the break. He sprinted back in abject panic, the dad who had left his kid at soft play.
Down on the touchline Röhl sighed, disappointed in his pupils again. McInnes bounced, gesticulated and occasionally headed thin air. Only an emotional miser could not have enjoyed his thunderous, winning enthusiasm for the game. Time and again, the Fourth Official nudged him away from the pitch, an art gallery attendant stopping a toddler from touching the sculptures.
Hymns rolled through the air, “We shall not/We shall not be moved…” and “So make a noise/you Gorgie Boys…” Rangers scored a consolation goal but nobody really cared, a party pooper arriving too late to be noticed. The rumble that followed the final whistle could surely be heard back in town and may even have cajoled a smile from stoney old Walter himself. Santa’s Hearts paraded around their stage and a Slade singalong made for a party beneath the floodlights. There was not a bauble in sight but 18,000 Christmases had come early.
