Scotland's unhappy affair of the Hearts

Take last week's 1-0 home defeat by Rangers. As I sat in the stand watching a contest between two desperately poor and just plain desperate teams as they tried desperately to 'do anything but get beat' , it struck me that last year watching Hearts was a mad, tumultous roller coaster ride, with as many peaks as there were troughs, the cascade between the two being sickeningly rapid at times. This year, alas, the ride is only down and, worse, I can't see the bottom yet.

The merest sliver of hope, one positive act or a decent performance, is all that is needed and the mood can switch again to one of optimism and expectation. I hate to say it but I think we have a way to go before we reach the low point.

The world has turned, there is a lot of disquiet, bucketloads of disgruntled Jambos. We are not happy. I have heard and read and blogged my thoughts on the mayhem at Tynecastle. Our owner, Vladimir Romanov, seems hell bent on destroying any good work he may have done over the last couple of years or so - and the first of the 'sack the board' banners was seen inside the ground at the Rangers game.

Vlad's other team, Kaunas, have now won their league in Lithuania and behold, we get . . . their coach Eujenijus Riabovas to take over (interim again) from also ex-coach of Kaunas Valdas Ivanauskas.

This betrays the often-mooted idea that Vlad is a madman who has no idea what he is doing. Vlad knows exactly what he is doing and so do I - Kaunas don't need Riabovas for a few weeks so Hearts get him. If this works and we somehow manage to pull ourselves together, Riabovas will stay and Ivanauskas will get his old job back at Kaunas. If it doesn't work, Riabovas will go back to Eastern Europe. Whether Ivanauskas comes back to Hearts is a different matter.

This tactic is one of the very few left to Romanov since he has painted himself into a ridiculous corner where he and our beloved team have no credibility whatsoever in a football context. What happens if Riabovas doesn't work? Let's face it, this is a distinct possibility. I am not even sure any of us can determine what Vlad would accept as 'working'. Where does Vlad go then? There is not a coach or manager on the planet that would give Hearts a second look; they would run a mile. So all that is left to Vlad is his cronies from Russia and Lithuania - and they are patently not up to the task.

This has mortally shaken my previously-solid belief that Vlad was good for us, even if it is painful at times. How many young guys of 15,16 and17 with talent and a choice of teams to go with would choose to risk their precious future at Riccarton? All they would see amongst the turmoil is a bunch of big scary Russians who don't speak English and have a tendency for management by fear. Could this lead to a generation(s) of squads coming through from Riccarton with no young talent from anywhere west of the Volga? That may be a bit exaggerated - but the thought scares me, that's for sure.

It has come to the point where the press are starting again to mention consortiums and takeovers. How does this one work? Vlad bought Hearts for £1.2m or thereabouts, so how come the first number mooted to oust Vlad is £35m? Now Craig Gordon is a fantastic goalkeeper but I don't think hen is worth £33.8m.

Now for the Rangers game . . .

I have always had a deep hatred of all things Rangers. Don't get me wrong, |I can't abide the other half of the gruesome twosome, either. Rangers just pip it for m, though, as the team I most like to beat/most hate to get beat by. Maybe it goes back to the mid-1980s Graeme Souness superiority complex they built into themselves, based on bringing in a pile of English hardmen. I don't care, I just hate them.

Like Hearts, Rangers are under loads of pressure, too. The Sun has an image of a guillotine hanging over their manager Paul Le Guen's head, as a sack-o-meter. It goes up and down depending on the Rangers results. If they'd done the same with the Hearts coach, it would of course be Russian roulette - and the gun would have five bullets.

I don't think there was anything in the game. Both teams were bereft of cohesion so the football was poor at best and at times desperate. Hearts were possibly marginally hungrier but Rangers had a bit more quality into the box.

The second half was a bit better but I still thought it was poor stuff. I never felt comfortable and there was an air of inevitability about Rangers goal. A nowhere ball caught between midfield and defence was not cleared by Hearts and the ball broke out to Nacho Novo. He was not closed down and got his shot in from 30 or so yards, low into the corner of the net.

My immediate reaction was to blame Gordon's positioning. This to me looked exactly like the goal Celtic scored against us at Parkhead to win the league last year. He is the best keeper in the country by a mile but he can still get it wrong. As it turned out, there was a deflection and he had no chance.

We don't have enough in the tank to recover from such setbacks so we sloped to the defeat rather than fought to the death to get the point back.

The Hearts' support were guilty of booing Saulius Mikoliunas, Marius Zaliukas and Nerijus Barasa. This led one of our coaches to claim that the crowd were racist against the Lithuanians. Naw, man, we are crappist against cr*p players. If this joker thinks he can win over the support with that sort of nonsense, he is sadly mistaken.