Finally, a new bread of heroes at Tynecastle as the ghosts of past failures are laid to rest; The Brave Hearts

IT was champagne for Hearts on Saturday and a cocktail of emotions for Rangers as the headiest era in their history ended with a defeat in the Tennents Scottish Cup Final.

Willie Young's fulltime whistle at Celtic Park confirmed that they, like Hearts in 1986, had forfeited both championship and cup in the last eight days of the season.

Outgoing manager, Walter Smith, had made his last stand and, after doing so, he mirrored the Ibrox side's mood: a mixture of despair and deprivation, laced with no little dignity and a dash of defiance.

'The bad news for Scottish football,' he said in tones calculated to spread a chill through every other dressing room in the country, 'is that this is as bad as it gets for Rangers. They will be better in the next two seasons'.

These parting words probably were the most poignant Smith has uttered in seven years of stewardship; albeit that the onus is on Dick Advocaat, his successor, to validate them.

Hearts, victors by 2-1, were left with the feeling that this is as good as it gets these days for most teams outwith the Old Firm and hadn't they waited long enough to share such a joyful experience?

Only their players' fathers and, in some cases, grandfathers, could recall with clarity when last a team from Tynecastle lifted the trophy: back in 1956 with a 3-1 win over Celtic at Hampden Park.

Those were the days of Conn, Bauld and Wardhaugh, tramcars, holidays in Pittenweem, penny chews and a pie and a pint for less than it costs now to buy a box of matches.

Jim Jefferies can barely remember them but they need no longer be cast up to him as a sepia-soaked reminder of the time when Hearts, always known as 'Edinburgh's Darlings', actually had the wherewithal to win things.

'People have been going back to the John Cummings and Freddie Gliddens this week for interviews about the Cup,' he reflected. 'In future, they can talk to the Neil McCanns and the Paul Ritchies.' This was the Hearts manager talking in the immediate afterglow of a triumph which suggested that you don't have to be especially good to succeed, just so long as you're lucky.

Hearts were blessed almost from the start with referee Young awarding them a penalty for an offence which, mulled over many times in TV replays, did not appear to have been committed inside the box.

They were blessed, too, when Brian Laudrup hit the post late in the first half and Gilles Rousset, by dint of staying on his feet, denied substitute Ally McCoist an earlier goal than the one he got.

It may be that fortune deservedly favoured them when, with David Weir having brought McCoist down in 86 minutes, Rangers were awarded a free kick on the edge of the area rather than the penalty they claimed.

Assistant referee, George Simpson, was dead in line with the incident and appeared to judge it quite correctly. Yet, for all that Rangers could have complained afterwards about being on the wrong end of adversity, they did not.

Nor did their fans who, in applauding Hearts' lap of honour, seemed to accept with a healthy degree of resignation that the sun had set on 12 years of unprecedented success and left them, for once in that period, without a trophy.

Departing players, most notably Richard Gough, contrived to be philisophical about their fate, the captain saying: 'That's two weeks in a row now I've found myself congratulating other teams. It's not the way it's been in my time.' One suspects that, when he takes stock of what promised falsely to be a momentous domestic season, Gough would admit that his and Rangers' greater hurt was losing the championship to Celtic the previous Saturday.

A Scottish Cup win may only have offered him a measure of consolation as he prepared to take his leave of Ibrox again and return to the United States.

But he seemed genuinly not to be unsympathetic towards Hearts.

They had won nothing grander than the Tennents Sixes since collecting the League Cup in 1962 and, of course, had lost the finals of the more prestigious tournament in 1968, 1976, 1986 and 1996, the last of these badly to Rangers.

So they were entitled to savour this long-awaited feat which, surely, has done much to remove the feeling of apprehension that appears to have stalked them on so many such occasions in the past.

Hearts, even when they were at their strongest in the 1950s, tended to have a problem of mentality in games against Rangers which is why their 4-0 win against them en route to winning the Cup the last time remains one of the high points in their history.

The problem manifested itself again in the season just ended with their conceding 13 goals to the Ibrox side in four league meetings.

Yet it was this abject record which, in a way, sustained them on Saturday with Jefferies being bound to alter their tactics and play a more prudent game based on a five-man midfield.

'It suited Rangers to hit us on the break,' he said, 'so we decided this time that we were going to let them have the ball and try to break us down.

Given the players they were without, we thought they might struggle to do that.' So it proved after Colin Cameron had put Hearts ahead with the penalty awarded in precisely 38 seconds when Steve Fulton fell into the box following a challenge by Ian Ferguson.

They granted Rangers all the possession they should have needed, despite the absences of Jorg Albertz, Jonas Thern and Alex Cleland, to get back into the game.

But, on the few occasions they did get through to Rousset, they found the French goalkeeper to be sound, not suspect.

The man whose gaffe turned the Final of two seasons earlier made sterling saves from Rino Gattuso and Brian Laudrup and excelled the more when he turned away the one free-kick that Lorenzo Amoruso did not drive either high or wide.

How Rangers missed the suspended Albertz in those situations. It was a matter of urgency with them that they introduce McCoist when they did, at the start of the second half, to apply some potency to their finishing.

The ageing striker went some way to confounding Craig Brown's argument for leaving him out of the World Cup. But not before Stephane Adam put Hearts further ahead and Thomas Flogel should have scored a third goal. Adam, Hearts' best outfield player, made Amoruso look anaemic when, with Rousset having heaved a 53rd minute free- kick almost the length of the field, he drove away from the Italian to score with an angled shot.

Andy Goram, who possibly thought he should have saved it, duly fielded with ease a header from Flogel, strengthening in the process his team-mates' belief that there was a way back for them; one which McCoist, above all, was likely to find and explore.

He proceeded to do so in 81 minutes, taking a pass from Gattuso and beating Rousset with a low shot which signalled Hearts' most fraught spell of the game.

They finally survived it in the fourth minute of injury time with Weir, their stoutest defender, making a crucial tackle on Sergio Porrini.

'Those last ten minutes or so were the longest of my life,' Jefferies admitted later, 'and hearing the fulltime whistle was the best moment of it.

The supporters must feel the same way. What about their ovation at the end?

'I said beforehand that we'd waited long enough for something like this to happen; that Hearts had been in the doldrums too long. But we've made good progress in the past three years and, given our resources, winning the Cup at last is a great achievement. We never reached any great heights in the match although we weren't fussy about giving any great cavalier performance.

'The important thing was winning and, hopefully, having done so will take some of the pressure off us in the future.' Rangers, their manager and a clutch of favourite players on the way out, face an uncertain one under Advocaat, Gough commenting: 'I hope that the next ten years are half as successful for Rangers as the last ten have been.

'The thing about a club like this is that you have to win. Rangers are entering a new era with Dick Advocaat. He's getting a lot of money to spend but it may be very difficult for him to generate the kind of success that we have enjoyed.' Gough, to his credit, was not critical about the circumstances in which Hearts were given a penalty and Rangers denied one.

He was only quizzical, as was Smith who commented tartly: 'It shows you that referees aren't biased towards Rangers.' Referee Young, it must be said, was extremely brave to take the two crucial decisions he did with 25,000 Rangers fans baying in his ear. Yet no less courageous than him were Hearts who, after decades of trying, finally caught up with their famous past.

BRIAN SCOTT