Hibs V Pars Replay At Tynecastle?

Well, no it won’t happen, but it should be played there in my opinion. Asking fans of Hibs and Dunfermline to shell out the cash necessary to go back to Hampden for a midweek replay makes sense to one organisation: the SFA. No-one else. They’ll be lucky to pull in a crowd of 12,000 for the match, perhaps even less if it gets covered on live television. What sort of atmosphere will that create? Even a full Hampden Park’s atmosphere isn’t the greatest, so when it’s less than a quarter full it’ll be like a training session. Surely that can’t be good for the flagship cup competition in this country?

I remember a cup semi-final back in the early ’90s between Hearts and Airdrie going to a midweek replay and it was a nightmare….in more ways than one for us Jambos! The first game had attracted a decent crowd of nearly 30,000 if my memory serves me correctly, but with the replay being only a few days later and screened live on BBC, just over 11,000 hardy souls made the journey back through. Those Hearts fans who stayed at home were most definitely the winners that night (we lost on penalties), but the point is that had the match been re-scheduled for a more sensible location e.g. Easter Road or even Fir Park, the match would have been played before a capacity crowd and would therefore have still had a ‘big game’ feel to it. As it was, the locals around Hampden probably thought that Queen’s Park had a home game in there that Wednesday night!

The thing is though, the fact that there is next to no chance of the Hibs-Dunfermline game being switched somewhere else is probably the main fault of Hibs themselves. Why? Well if you remember, at the semi-final stage last year when Hearts were Hibs’ opposition, the Tynecastle club publicly touted Murrayfield as their preferred venue for the tie. However despite this being the most logical choice for the tie (a world-class stadium in the same city as the two participants), Hibs for some reason didn’t play ball and insisted that the match be played at Hampden. After all, this was the ‘spiritual home’ of Scottish football.

The SFA would only have seriously listened to the Murrayfield proposal had both clubs been behind the idea, but I do wonder how Hibs feel about going back to Hampden now? I’d bet that quite a large percentage of their fans would prefer the shorter trip to Tynecastle, or another venue that would be smaller and fuller, for the replay. Sadly though, their stance last year makes it very unlikely that these games will be moved away from Hampden in the near future, which is a shame.

So….back to Scottish football’s ‘spiritual home’ it is!