Kingston Should Wing It!

Our poll asking which position you prefer Larry Kingston playing in ended fairly even, with a slight majority of 58% opting for him playing on the right-wing berth that he occupied so effectively against Falkirk yesterday.

Kingston is without doubt a player of great skill and charisma. He’s definitely the most popular Hearts player with the fans at the moment, but I do sometimes wonder if his contribution to the team merits all the adulation.

For me Kingston in many ways is what you might call a ‘luxury’ player. He’s not the sort of guy who’ll bomb all over the park scrapping to get his team back into a game that they’re struggling in. He’s more the sort of guy who’ll produce two or three pieces of magic in a game, and one of them may result in a decisive goal. In other words, he’s worth having in your team for what he is capable of doing, but it’s questionable whether or not he can hold down a position as key as one in the centre of midfield.

For me his most effective position has definitely been wide on the right to date. Out there you can just about get away with a player of his type. He can still be involved enough to create chances and torment the opposition, but it means that if he does want to switch off for 5-10 minutes (as he does regularly), the team have more chance of getting away with it. If he does this while playing in the centre, the opposition can easily exploit this and you might be beaten by the time he decides to play again!

Quite what Hearts’ best central midfield pairing is though, is another question. Stewart and Jonsson did well yesterday, but they need several more games together to truly cement a decent partnership, but it does have potential. I still can’t help thinking though, that they need a genuinely hard player in there – someone in the Brellier mould.

As for Larry, I’d like to see him playing wide right for a few games in a row to see just how good he can become. As I said before, he has bags of talent, and if he can start to display this more often he could be the sort of ‘jack in a box’ for Hearts that makes the difference between 2nd or 3rd in the league……or winning a crucial cup tie or losing it…..