Do Hearts Deserve UEFA Place?

As Hearts enter the last chance saloon that is Rugby Park on Sunday for qualifying for the UEFA Cup next season, I’ve been pondering whether or not they actually deserve to get there.

At the beginning of this season if you asked your average Jambo if they’d consider third place in the league to be a success what do you think the response would have been? I’m willing to be that it would have been a resounding ‘no’. And if you told most of them that they would need to win on the last day of the season and hope that a result elsewhere also went their way, I don’t think they’d have been too impressed.

Would this attitude have been caused by misplaced arrogance? Possibly, but it’s still not difficult to see why expectations were much higher than in previous seasons. Even despite the expected loss of Skacel and Webster after last season’s cup final and the much-publicised bizarre team selections and management of the squad, people were still entitled to think that this squad of players were capable of finishing at least second in a season that would to see both Old Firm teams continuing to be as poor as they had been the previous year.

While some fans are rightly pointing out that the side has had a reasonably decent run of form in the latter part of the season, the serious damage had already been done much earlier in the season. It probably all came to a head with the infamous ‘Riccarton 3’ scandal and to be honest it was always going to be nigh impossible for Hearts to fully bounce back from that this season. The heart had effectively been ripped out of arguably the best Hearts team of the modern era and each and every one of the players in the squad has been affected.

The saddest thing about all of this is that it was completely unnecessary. I was never a fan of Pressley as a player, but he was still a key figure as far as the dressing room was concerned and to make an enemy of such a man was ill-advised in my view. Skacel and Webster had both left for reasons they were unwilling to reveal publicly, but I think we can safely assume that these would not differ too much from the reasons that both Brellier and Fyssas are leaving us in the summer: stuff was going on behind the scenes that is not conducive to an effective football team. Robbie Neilson is another player who, despite his obvious limitations, has been treated poorly and is being mistakenly overlooked for first team selection in favour of players being asked to play out of position. Again, this is unnecessarily weakening the side.

All of this has meant that the Lithuanian contingent have been under a lot more pressure that they otherwise would have been. They were temporarily seen as the bad guys that Romanov wanted in there instead of established fans’ favourites and for a time these guys could do nothing right, even if they weren’t playing all that badly. This has resulted in the likes of Mikoliunas’ and Zaliukas’ confidence being much lower that it should have been and Jankauskas going into even more of cream puff that he arrived with. This has not been fair on either the players themselves or the fans paying to watch them and as a result, the whole club has suffered.

So compare and contrast Aberdeen, our rivals for third place, with our situation. They are a team packed predominantly with solid and reliable SPL players with a management team of a similar standard. They have no-one of any exceptional ability in their side, but they go about their business in an honest way and do the best they can with what they have. Regardless what we think of their manager Jimmy Calderwood, he has not done badly with nothing like the resources that Hearts have had, although he has had the key advantage of actually being in charge of team affairs, unlike anyone in the Tynecastle dugout in the last two years!

So who deserves the European place? Obviously I want Hearts to get it as even though it’s only the UEFA Cup, there is still a lot of money to be made out of the group stages and you are much more likely to attract decent players to your club if you can say you’re in Europe. But Aberdeen have been above us for quite a while in the league now and it would be a big blow for them to lose out on the last day of the season.

Ach…..who am I trying to kid making a balanced argument for both sides? Hearts deserve it, if for nothing else just to give that clown Calderwood something else to publicly moan at us about in the papers next week! Go on the JTs!