Luck is just a pair of cherries

WILLIAM HUNTER

22 Apr 1991

IF HEARTS make it to Europe (a tour that is not nearly package yet), they will carry with them some extra luggage they picked up at McDiarmid Park which it would be sporting to declare.

There will be nothing heavy about the added hand baggage and Hearts should not be taxed with it.

But if their conscience is searched they will have to own up that, on any excursion to the Continent, they will pack a little luck at St Johnstone's expense.

Hearts led 2-0 after 20 minutes and kept the score that way to the end.

They never looked like being caught.

Yet hardly ever did they look two goals better.

St Johnstone appeared to have scored first, only the referee didn't think so.

If he had been sitting at the back of the stand (a position that would have been an advantage to Mr McCluskey for much of the strange afternoon he had) he would have seen it otherwise.

In the fifth minute, the ball looked a little over the line when Scott Crabbe scooped away a header by Steve Maskrey.

At that stage, Hearts looked to be in for a desperate hour and a half.

When they had dampened St Johnstone's initial fire, they lit one of their own when a cross by Wayne Foster was nodded in by John Colquhoun.

Then good fortune again beamed on Hearts.

When a thunderous shot from 20 yards or so by Gary McKay came down off the underside of the crossbar, it was judged to have gone in -- officially.

Ballistically (and again from the back of the stand) there didn't seem anyway that could be possible.

Anyhow, the ball was travelling too fast for anybody to be entirely sure.

Both bits of luck were marginal, especially the second because Foster had the ball in the net after McKay's shot, and as the referee was trotting his way back to the centre spot.

But if Hearts were not jammy, or not exactly, any cherries that were going were given to them.

For their win they owed much to how assiduously Alan McLaren played Allan Moore and to the eclipse of Maskrey by George Wright.

Hearts showed some utilitarian Euro skills in the capacity to mop up time in the second half.

They kept the ball in the air, they slowed their steps to a minuet, such worldly assurance in a sometimes stroppy game was hard not to admire.

They even included the weary dodge of making a substitution in the last minute.

Beneath the surface coolness, however, there was a lot of churning going on.

It came to the top when Gary McKay was sent off after two cautions.

Coming after the dismissal of John Robertson the previous Saturday, his departure seemed to indicate how Hearts were fluttering ahead of this week's game against Celtic.

Some distance from the rim of Europe, Hearts could be operating right on the edge of their nerves.

"All our games are cup ties," Joe Jordan, the manager, said afterwards.

Taken from the Herald