Hearts V St Mirren (Tynecastle)

It’s rarely been the most attractive proposition on the SPL fixture list, but today’s home match against St Mirren is already promising to be one that could tell us much about the direction that Hearts’ season is likely to take.

After the initial optimism of manager Csaba Laszlo’s arrival at the club and the fine performance in the first match over Motherwell, we’ve started to see all of the little negatives that have plagued Hearts under Vladimir Romanov once again starting to chip away.

The inexlicable farce in relation to the goalkeeping situation at Tynecastle has left the majority of the supporters feeling far from confident that Laszlo truly is ‘in charge’ of first team affairs, and whoever is selected to play between the sticks this afternoon is likely to have many people already making their minds up on that score. For example, if former Kaunas ‘keeper Marian Kello is coincidentally given his debut this afternoon in the same week as the new Tynecastle goalkeeping coach, another man with Kaunas links, was appointed, then rightly or wrongly people are going to feel that the reasons for this decision are not necessarily all related to football.

This would obviously be unfair on Kello, who may well be an excellent goalkeeper, but the Hearts fans have been used to an ‘alternative’ form of decision-making when it comes to team selection, including bias being shown to those who signed from Kaunas, and therefore have every right to be sceptical about this if it happens. If it does, you really have to hope that Kello does well for his sake, as he could quite easily be made out as the bad guy before his Hearts career even begins, as he’ll be seen as VR’s latest on-field ‘favourite’.

St Mirren are not the sort of team that we’d have hand-picked for a game of such potentially pivotal importance, but unfortunately our old 1986 adversaries do indeed provide the opposition this afternoon.

Their manager Gus MacPherson has been in the press lately giving his rather frank views on Scottish referees, and to be perfectly honest he was 100% justified when it came to the decision to award Celtic a penalty against his side in their league opener at Parkhead.

St Mirren gave as good as they got against the SPL champions that day, and under MacPherson have rarely not been tough opposition for Hearts, so I’d expect today’s game to be another stern test.

Apart from Kello, Hearts could also be giving a debut to Ugandan David Obua, although Danish striker Mike Tullberg is still said to be struggling for full match fitness and is unlikely to feature. Eggert Jonsson is out with a groin injury.

Should be a telling afternoon…….