Lost in translation

The management insist there are no problems, but Paul Hartley for one is finding a few things hard to understand. Stewart Fisher reports

PAUL Hartley says he had no real idea where he was meant to be playing during Wednesday night’s CIS Cup quarter-final defeat to Hibs.

The Scotland international, one of the finest attacking midfielders in Britain, was posted missing in midweek when he followed Belarusian coach Eduard Malo-feev’s instructions to push further forward as support striker behind lone Lithuanian frontman Andreas Velicka. With Hartley and makeshift right-winger Robbie Neilson out of position, Hearts stumbled out of the CIS Cup without a shot on or off target.

“I was disappointed with the way things went on Wednesday night, and also with my own performance,” Hartley said. “I play my best football breaking from the middle of the park and linking play. I’m not quite sure where I was playing on Wednesday.

“It was a new role for me, just off the front and one that I’m not used to. I’ve never played there at all, I don’t think. It was just one of those things. But I am not blaming anybody. I was told to try to support Velicka up front if we were getting balls from the back, play balls forward to Andreas and try to link up, but it didn’t work. I will hopefully play again on Monday, and play a lot better.”

It’s two weeks since Hartley and Craig Gordon flanked Steven Pressley as he read out his proclamations of “significant unrest” in the Tynecastle dressing room. Despite a decent showing in defeat at Celtic Park last week, things have hardly looked up.

Hearts are now five games without a win, giving them 11 points fewer than George Burley’s side had at this stage last season, and went into the weekend trailing Celtic by 13 points. Moreover, at times Vladimir Romanov’s reported comments that he’d sell the whole lot of them haven’t seemed like such an idle threat. With Julien Brellier, Takis Fyssas, and Czech mates Roman Bednar and Michal Pospisil all rarely seen, the team are nigh on unrecognisable from the side which started last season so impressively under Burley, while the likes of Marius Zaliukas and Andreas Velicka appear to have been parachuted in as cut-price first-team regulars. Even when in conciliatory mood, it is this backdrop which informs Hartley’s desire that the team “keeps improving”.

“I think it is very important that we get back on the rails and get back to winning ways,” he said. “It is a big gap at 13 points at this time in the season, but we have got to stick together, keep improving and try to get back to Celtic.

“We will still challenge for it [the title]. Everybody has written us off and that is their opinion. We are only 13 games into the season, and we know that it is a tall order, but in the last year we have come a long way. We just need to keep improving.”

That may not be so easy. Since Pressleygate, tomorrow night’s opponents, Falkirk, have knocked Celtic out of the CIS Cup and taken eight goals off Dundee United and Falkirk, with six of them going to Anthony Stokes. For Hartley, a former team-mate of John Hughes across the city at Easter Road, Hughes’ emergence as a manager has come as no surprise.

“I think Falkirk have been excellent,” said Hartley. “I played at Hibs with John and he is a great character. He is going to be a good manager, and I was very impressed with them the last time they played at Tynecastle. They knock the ball about from the back, they try to play football, and have some exciting players. I think John was always geared up to be a manager and the job he has done has been terrific.”

If things are to pick up at Tynecastle, lines of communication will have to improve. The club persisted with the bizarre tactic of putting sporting director-cum-translator Alex Koslovski up to preview the match and, for all Hartley’s positional confusion, the interpreter believes nothing is being lost in translation.

“There is one language on the field, and it is a football,” Koslovski said. “With proper, command, control and proper organisation you don’t need a lot of translation.”

Koslovski, a personable man who played under Malofeev at Dinamo Minsk, has no shortage of belief in the former Soviet Union and Belarus national coach.

“Eduard was my coach when I started at Dinamo Minsk and he was my hero at the time,” Koslovski said.

“In 1985 when Malofeev was USSR national team coach, this team was No 1 in the Fifa rankings, they even beat England at Wembley.

“I think he needs a calm period at the club. We think his passion will pass on to the players and they will show it as well. I think he will continue to do this job and of course I wish him to succeed. If he succeeds then everyone will be happy, including all the supporters. But my job is not just about repaying him,” Koslovski added.

“If any other coach comes to Hearts I will help him as well. It is nothing personal. My job to help people to assimilate to foreign life and football.”

Hartley’s week wasn’t uniformly bad. On Thursday he was inducted – along with Pressley – into the Hearts Hall of Fame, an event ignored by Romanov and the board. The fans turned up though, and one even paid £1,000 to play a round of golf at Loch Lomond with Hartley. Whether someone else will have paid for him to play at their football club by then is another matter entirely.

Taken from the Sunday Herald