Hearts 1-3 Barcelona

I always felt that it would be difficult for Hearts to take many positives out of a pre-season friendly against a team like Barcelona.

I’m not really sure why, but underneath all of the hype surrounding the illustrious Catalans and the phenomenal ticket sales for the match, this was still just a pre-season friendly bound to be littered with substitutions….and their subs were always going to be infinitely better than ours!!

However even despite this inkling, I can’t help feeling that yesterday’s match was a huge opportunity missed by Hearts. Here was the perfect chance for them to showcase an exciting new crop of players, coached by a proper manager, in front of the biggest crowd attracted to a Hearts game in Scotland’s capital in the club’s history.

The 28th of July 2007 should have been in Vladimir Romanov’s diary with a little side-note suggesting that this was the deadline for some serious moves to enhance the entire Hearts first team set-up into something resembling what it was a couple of years ago. A proper coach should have been appointed a long time ago so that he could have signed some proper players to come with him, bed them into the squad and have them looking sharp ahead of the new season. Then by the time the Barcelona game came around, despite comprehensive defeat almost being a given in that game, Hearts could at least show some positive signs of making progress and looking as though they could make a decent fist of things in Scotland again in the coming season.

As it was, things could not have been more different yesterday. The ominous sight of Eduard Malofeev in the Hearts dug-out should really have told us all we needed to know before a ball was even kicked, and the team were every bit the disjointed mess that we were used to seeing during the Russian’s ill-fated time in charge last season.

Granted, it’s very difficult to produce a free-flowing, flawless performance in a match involving so many substitutions, but even in the first half when Hearts had most of their first team regulars on the park, I can’t say that things were overly encouraging.

Don’t get me wrong, there were occasions when Hearts did play some nice football, but they were pretty rare.

Michael Stewart was back in the team and to be honest he produced what I would a typical Michael Stewart performance: looking every bit the Premiership footballer in his nonchalence, but sadly with the exception of a couple of sublime reverse passes (and they were truly sublime), ultimately anonymous and nowhere near as big a presence as Hearts need in the midfield. I still believe that Stewart is a good footballer and has something to offer Hearts, but he needs to start getting really stuck in all the time out there, otherwise he’ll be every bit the luxury player he was during his first spell at Tynecastle.

As for the new boys who were given a run-out, we had a real mixed bag. It’s very difficult to rate these guys on the evidence of a friendly match against such class of course, but I was actually quite encouraged by the performances of Ksanavicious on the left wing in the first half and Ruben Palazuelos in defensive midfield in the second. The latter in particular appears comfortable on the ball and it was good to see him so eager to be on the ball so much.

As for the other new boys, I think we’ll need to see them a few times again to be sure about them. Beniusis didn’t make a very good impression at all up front, but I did think that Jonsson looked capable enough at the back, even though I’m led to believe that he is a midfield player.

Some of the same old problems we had last season were very apparent, though. For a start, despite a full pre-season behind him, Andrius Velicka still struggles to run properly. If this is him at his most mobile, then we really do need someone else to play in this role up front…and that someone is not Juho Makela, even despite the fact he scored yesterday! Perhaps the likes of Pinilla and Bednar (if he ever gets fit again) could offer us a much better alternative. I hope so.

As for Barcelona, well, they never really played at the tempo that we know they can, but they were awesome at times. Ronaldinho is so aware that it’s frightening and you really don’t appreciate just how strong a player he is until you see him live. At one stage, three Hearts players tried to kick lumps out of him and they just bounced off him! Eto’o is a marvellous footballer too, although we didn’t really see all that much of him.

However, for me the two guys who control everything that Barca do are the midfield duo of Iniesta and Deco. The latter only appeared for the second half, but once they were together in there, you could tell that Hearts were up against Barca’s first choice midfield in the centre. We simply couldn’t get the ball off them! The weight of any pass to the strikers was consistently fantastic, something that we only see maybe once or twice in your average SPL game. Great to watch, though.

So all in all, it was an entertaining enough afternoon if you were a neutral just there to see class footballers in the flesh. But if you were a Hearts supporter, I think you have to admit you were a tad deflated trudging out of Murrayfield yesterday. Yes there were one or two positives to take from the game, but they were outweighed by several negatives I felt.

I just hope that Romanov has something up his sleeve before the seasons starts, but why is it that I’m having my doubts about that?