Gordon avoids fate of fellow rebels

CRAIG Gordon, as expected, emerged apparently unscathed from his disciplinary meeting at Tynecastle yesterday. The Hearts and Scotland goalkeeper drove off without comment after the 39-minute meeting with club official Pedro Lopez, but Fraser Wishart, the players' union representative, expressed confidence that Gordon would keep his place in the team.

"Craig Gordon is captain of Hearts football club, and will be playing, I am sure, at the weekend," said Wishart, the secretary of the Scottish Professional Footballers Association (SPFA). "He is a player, and he is club captain. There is nothing that has come out of today's meeting that's more specific. It's in the hands of the club and we'll see where we go from here."

Lopez, the so-called director of infrastructure at Hearts, was also the official who conducted similar disciplinary talks with Steven Pressley and Paul Hartley, the other players who made a public protest against the way the club is being run under majority shareholder Vladimir Romanov. Pressley has since left the club, and Hartley appears likely to do so if he can find a new club when the transfer window opens at the end of the month.

In a further hint that nothing similar would befall Gordon, Wishart added that each of the three cases should be regarded separately, for all that they arose from the same action at the club's training ground. "Comparing Steven Pressley with Paul Hartley or Craig Gordon is wrong," he said.

"I cannot go into the situation. It was individual hearings at every opportunity. What was discussed today is absolutely confidential."

Although Wishart would not divulge details of the discussion, his comments about Gordon's state of mind were enough to show that nothing serious had happened in the meeting. Given the goalkeeper was appointed club captain last week, and given, too, his financial worth to Hearts, that was also likely to be the case.

"He's quite happy," the SPFA official continued. "He's captain of Heart of Midlothian Football Club, he's looking forward to the games coming up, and is going to have a big derby game [next] Tuesday.

"I think he's quite honoured to be captain of Hearts. I don't think he's had problems in recent weeks. He's here today, but that doesn't mean there's problems."

After acting in what is understood to have been a heavy-handed manner when dealing with Pressley, Lopez appears to have recognised that, given Gordon's value to the club, a more conciliatory approach was required in his case. The 23-year-old goalkeeper could well move in the summer, but that was accepted as a possibility long before the saga of the Riccarton Three was begun one Friday in October.

Nonetheless, Wishart was unable or unwilling to say definitively that the matter was now at an end, and that there would be no further meetings arising out of that day. "I can't tell you," he admitted when asked how close to a conclusion he thought the issue was.

"Craig Gordon was called to a meeting by the club. He was happy to come along and answer a few questions, and the details of that will have to remain confidential. Procedures may go forward and may not go forward. It's uncertain. Procedures will be followed and we will hear in due course from the club. Craig will go on, I'm sure, and have a long and successful career."

The fact that each of the trio was dealt with separately and some time apart was an indication that Hearts, as Wishart suggested, wished to regard each individual separately. Gordon and Hartley sat either side of Pressley when the former captain delivered his statement, and there was no doubt that they agreed with his assessment that internal discipline was not what it should be. But taking on all three at once was clearly too much for Lopez, who appears to have worked on the divide-and-conquer principle.

The method of dealing with the dissident trio has disillusioned many supporters, but it has also succeeded - so far at least - in deterring those supporters from protesting too vehemently. Pressley's "amicable" departure was announced on the club website an hour after a match, while nothing has so far been said about Lopez's meetings with Hartley and Gordon.

In fact, more and more aspects of the way in which Lopez is conducting the day-to-day running of the club are going unexplained. Valdas Ivanauskas, the head coach, is now the only Hearts employee who regularly speaks to the general media, and the credibility of his statements is compromised by the fact that virtually no-one believes he selects the team without the intervention of Romanov.

Taken from the Scotsman