Hearts throw a party at last

The tension was unbearable, but, finally, the Edinburgh club's loyal supporters could savour sweet success.

Alasdair Reid reports

CELEBRATIONS can sometimes have a ritual quality, but when Willie Young blew his final whistle just after 4.45pm yesterday, the eruption of maroon happiness that engulfed Celtic Park's north stand and the cacophony of noise it produced were as spontaneous as they come.

Joy, unbridled joy from the Hearts supporters, who somehow seemed to know what was expected of them.

Goodness knows, in 36 years without a trophy, they had not had much chance to practise the reception they would afford a piece of silverware.

The Rangers fans, however, were not so sure what to do in its absence.

At the end of their first fallow season in 12 years, a deathly hush fell on their side of the ground, the silence of dashed expectation that only a football crowd can produce.

For a few moments, they could consider the irony of the fact that the lavish era of Walter Smith had ended without a trinket to mark its passing.

Then, though, they opened up again, giving full throat to the defiance that had added a plaintive tinge to their songs all day.

Rangers supporters are more accustomed to dealing with an abundance of success than an absence, more used to subduing triumphalism than despair.

Yet long before the penalty claim that Young denied them in the 86th minute, long before the goal that Stephane Adam hammered past Andy Goram in the 53rd minute or the penalty that Colin Cameron lashed past the goalkeeper with barely 90 seconds played, there was a sense that they were already preparing for this new state of affairs.

As they waited outside the stadium for their players to arrive, confidence was at a noticeably low ebb.

"We'd better f***ing win," said one blue-clad supporter, the worried look on his face betraying his fear that winning would not be the stroll that it was in the corresponding match two years ago.

Then, as if surprised by his own pessimism, he tried to jolt himself out of it.

"Ach, of course we'll f***ing win," he said, contriving jauntiness for a few seconds.

"No bother.

4-1."

The Hearts fans, by contrast, simply wore the looks of surprised delight that has been a feature of their arrival at three Cup finals in the three years of Jim Jefferies' stewardship of the club.

Memories of hard times, of the years of under-achievement spent on the brink of financial disaster, are too many and too recent to be dispensed overnight, but as they celebrated at the end of yesterday's game, it was a safe bet that dispensing of another form would be dedicated to the effort last night.

The announcer called on them to be orderly; as they sang their way out of the stadium, they were clearly determined to add drunk and dis to that attribute.

Hearts have been tormented by failure for so long that their longer-suffering fans could probably tell you what kind of wine goes best with fingernails.

They may lack the endearing nuttiness of Kilmarnock, last year's victors, but any trophy that escapes the clutches of the Old Firm falls into more evidently gleeful hands instead.

Any club whose official song celebrates their spelling ability has a marvellous quirkiness of its own.

Their famous ritual of scarf-twirling has been mocked by many down the years - and on the massive bank of that Celtic Park stand it did give them the appearance of being attacked by a plague of maroon locusts - but the jibes will matter not one bit to them this morning.

Moreover, there will be none of the managerial bitterness that despoiled Celtic's success on the same ground last week.

Jefferies is one of their own, and while he stuck to his now-familiar line that winning the Cup would make heroes of the players, every Hearts fan will now put him on the highest pedestal of all.

If the legions of supporters were comfortable as their side achieved its win, however, it was something the manager rarely shared.

Nor was the calm that he had tried to spread in the build-up to the game, which, it was easy to suspect, he had provided only to ease his own nerves.

From the start, Jefferies was out of his box in a metaphorical sense, and as he surged towards the touchline he was frequently out of it in a literal sense as well.

John Rowbotham, the fourth official, spent the entire afternoon struggling to keep Jefferies within the technical area, keeping him in command of his trolley was probably one task too many, even for such an experienced official.

Anybody watching the interplay between the two men would have been convinced that Rowbotham was only there to act as Jefferies' personal counsellor.

Strangely, so many of the Rangers players seemed willing to volunteer for the task as well, for their ineffectual strategies, particularly in midfield, should have been enough to soothe Jefferies' concerns.

Rino Gattuso may bristle with malevolence, but it is rarely tempered by a purpose more creative than getting his retaliation in first.

You could say that he has the ability to take a tackle on his own terms, but when that means writhing in an indignant heap on the turf it can hardly be considered a useful quality.

Nor could the shooting power of Lorenzo Amoruso, his fellow-Italian, for whom the term long-range shot was an indication of where the ball tended to finish, rather than where it started.

Indeed, the man-of-the-match award presented to Gilles Rousset, the Hearts goalkeeper, at the end, could almost have been seen as a personal gift from Amoruso.

Certainly, there was little to trouble Rousset before those desperate last 10 minutes which Jefferies, with more accuracy than originality, described as the longest of his life.

The greatest torture of his lifelong association with Hearts must be that patience is a virtue that has passed him by.

On the other side of the park, the supporters were at last suffering with him.

For them, a familiar sense of fatalistic dread swept through their ranks when Ally McCoist swept in his goal nine minutes from full time.

Different times, different places, but in many painful ways they had been here before.

The penalty claim near the end was the last torture they had to endure.

And then the joy.

The wall of sound they had pent up within them for 36 years - and, of course, 10 minutes - was suddenly unleashed.

The scarves were gyrating wildly again and a few spectators, rashly, but probably understandably, sprinted onto the pitch to clutch the Hearts players.

Most of the Rangers players stood stock still near the middle of the pitch.

The one exception was Gattuso who, for the umpteenth time, sprawled himself on the grass.

Huddles are the fashion at this ground, and Jefferies and his back-up team duly formed one.

The manager was, fittingly, at the heart of it, as Billy Brown, his assistant, and John Robertson, the substitute, clenched him in a display of unadulterated joy.

Some might consider it the one drawback of the day that Robertson did not make it on to the pitch, but it did not seem to distress the player too much.

In the unfamiliar circumstances of celebrating the Cup win, nobody on the far side seemed to mind too much either.

Taken from timesonline.co.uk