McCall home to think again

HEARTS 3-0 DUNDEE UTD

JONATHAN COATES AT TYNECASTLE

IAN McCall first visited Tynecastle as a manager in April, and after a 2-1 defeat promised that it would be "a different Dundee United" that accompanied him next time round. No-one within earshot of that declaration could have expected that his words would come back to haunt him.

And what a difference. United that day played better football than Hearts, scored from an inspired free-kick by Danny Griffin and lost only because a cruel deflection off Stuart Duff sent the ball into the path of Andy Kirk. On Saturday they conveyed a pale imitation of even that level of accomplishment.

This was not the way things were supposed to pan out. McCall has brought quality, irrefutable quality into his side, and a long since disillusioned support has awoken to the notion that better times are on the agenda. But the fans are quickly having to adjust to this being a suspended renaissance.

"I wasn’t expecting us to lose our first three games," confessed Derek McInnes at Tynecastle, and he isn’t the only one in a state of shock.

"When you get beaten it can erode your confidence, and it is our job to make sure that doesn’t happen," said McCall, determined not to let a sticky gelling phase set the tone for the season.

He has to act quickly because United have become progressively more demoralised by their dramatic loss to Hibs, their predictable demise at Parkhead and now their spectacular inferiority to Hearts. It is too early for us to make conclusions, but the denizens of Tynecastle have already defined them as a laughing stock, as intoxicatingly funny as anything at the Fringe. This was not because of the three sloppy goals they conceded in the first half as much as their hapless efforts to salvage pride later on. The entertainment had a pronounced focus on Billy Dodds, who might as well have painted his face white and worn a red nose.

Can anything meaningful be wrought from the embers of Dodds’s career? He cannot have run about like such a headless chicken for years, and an unforgiving sequence of events marked him out as a target for derision. At one point he was caught offside, but decided to round the goalkeeper in any case and tap the ball into an empty net, just to prove that he still could. Dodds hit the post.

Twenty minutes later, he tried to hook a ball back over his head and succeeded only in walloping it into his own face.

How the mighty fall. But no, the word mighty is inappropriate in any discussion on Dundee United, for power and dynamism are the commodities they most lack. Marvin Andrews would single-handedly have injected it, but the Livingston defender chose to bypass the Tannadice revolution - and you have to admire his adviser’s foresight.

United have assembled talent but they have not concocted the kind of blend that allowed Livingston to come from nowhere and trump all their provincial rivals two seasons ago. McCall will step up his emergency search this week for a strong defender, because the threesome of David McCracken, Mark Wilson and Alan Archibald does not look like a top-six rear-guard.

"This is always the way I have done it. I made brand new teams at my last two clubs and it worked fine," reflected McCall, so successful in working from scratch at Airdrie and Falkirk. "I suppose at this level you just have to do it a lot quicker."

Even at this stage, inertia has set in throughout the team, but it is at the back that the prime restorative work needs doing. Three goals described by McCall as "daft and embarrassing" caused the terminal decline of the visitors’ enthusiasm.

The first began with an overbearing challenge by McCracken on Dennis Wyness, and ended with a ramshackle wall leaping clear of Phil Stamp’s 22 yard-drive, which sped low to Paul Gallacher’s right. Stamp was also responsible for the second, stretching to pull down Scott Severin’s pass on the right and cross high into the space between goalkeeper and defence, where Wilson heard no shout from the onrushing Gallacher and headed casually beyond him.

At 2-0, you felt that United might still retrieve something from the game. Mark de Vries was not about to let any suspense linger.

The skill with which he skipped aside two tackles and rifled the ball home was magnificent to behold, but what about that defending? Griffin, obviously intimidated by the giant Dutchman’s presence, allowed a simple aerial ball to knock off his back and into the striker’s path, a practice no less hazardous than cliff-diving.

A lesser team might have failed to accept these imitations, and Hearts look more of a marauding unit on their own patch than ever.

Man of the match this time was Scott Severin, whose flawless distribution allowed Hearts to play with rare abandon once the result was secured, but it could just as easily have gone to Stamp, De Vries, or to Neil Macfarlane.

United could have held as keen a contest for the prize of worst sinner.

Taken from the Scotsman