Kingston To Sign New Hearts Deal?

As if there wasn’t already enough going on (or not!) to have us scratching our heads about, news breaks that our illustrious Ghanaian Larry Kingston wants to ‘spend the rest of his career’ with Hearts.

Kingston is a player that many fans were expecting to be one of the first out of the Tynecastle exist door this summer, if for nothing else the fact that he is probably one of the very few marketable assets that we have left. Until now he has seemed every bit your typical foreign mercenary – sign for the club on big wages, kiss the badge a few times, prove that you CAN actually play every few weeks or whenever you feel like it, and then start talking the talk about how you’d love to play in the Premiership one day.

It seemed almost inevitable that Larry would be looking to move on either midway through his current contract or perhaps even sooner if a decent offer from a big club came in, so I must admit I find the story (as reported by Talk 107) that he is now willing to commit himself to Hearts for the long-term more than a little strange. Has he in fact been touted around all and sundry and no-one wants to take him on the wages he commands I wonder? It’s certainly possible, as despite the fact that he has some outstanding skills when he decides to put his mind to it, he is one of those ‘luxury’ players that cannot always be depended upon. For me he does not have the workrate required to be a success in a league like the English Premiership, and maybe this is some thing that Kingston himself is now starting to realise.

But assuming that this story actually does have credence, and that Larry hadn’t been smoking some dubious substances when he informed the Press of his intentions, would we actually welcome this move? He’s certainly a good player and would continue to be a valuable asset one would imagine, but does he contribute as much as a player who earns the sort of wages that he is alleged to be bringing in should?

The answer to that on the evidence I have seen is ‘no’, but I do think that the potential is there for a strong and purposeful management team to get the very best out of this player, perhaps in a similar way to how Burley initially got Rudi Skacel firing. Let’s face it if Kingston could produce the form that we know he is capable of on a weekly or even bi-weekly basis then we’d have a fantastic player on our hands, so perhaps if Hearts could retain his services and allow him to work for a management team who know what they’re doing, things could turn out well here.

It all comes down to that one condition again though doesn’t it…………