Scots can reap reward from Hearts' European odyssey

ANDREW SMITH

HEARTS manager Craig Levein may have been guilty of gilding the lily in describing his club’s UEFA Cup second round pairing with Bordeaux as "incredible". But such a superlative would be entitled to trip from his tongue were the Edinburgh side to leave the club from red wine country red-faced.

The most incredible happening on the European front last week was, in fact, Scotland’s rise to ninth in UEFA’s country rankings, only three places shy of winning the right to have a third club entrant in the Champions League. The Old Firm could then be responsible for another club, most likely Hearts, earning a crack at the continent’s blue-riband tournament.

The rest of Scottish football has performed woefully in the business of earning co-efficient points in the past five years, to the extent that every single club from the top five leagues, even one currently experiencing difficulties on the home front such as Bordeaux, would consider it humiliating to exit from the UEFA Cup at the hands of any Scottish team not playing their football in a fancy big stadium in Glasgow.

But they would be unwise to treat this Hearts side in such a manner. The Edinburgh club’s 2-0 aggregate defeat over Bosnians side Zeljeznicar wasn’t simply encouraging because Levein’s team showed a maturity for competing at this level by closing out the tie with a scoreless draw in Sarajevo on Wednesday. This success was a boon for the European fortunes of Scottish clubs outside of the Glasgow behemoths. For with it, Hearts became only the fourth such club since Dundee United reached the UEFA Cup final 16 years go to survive two rounds in Europe.

This might be small potatoes, perhaps, and the reason they may have achieved this is that, unlike Dundee, who were vanquished by Perugia, Levein’s side were fortunate to avoid a club from a country with any football standing on the continent. And to follow that argument through you would have to say that having drawn Bordeaux, it is entirely reasonable to expect Hearts’ interest in the UEFA Cup to end in southern France next month.

Not if you’re Craig Levein, though, who prior to the draw had been making noises about wanting to miss out on a Parma or a Barcelona

and instead be presented with a middle-ish ranking side, who could stir the imagination but also serve as inspiration.

Now his team are facing a team of exactly that ilk they are sure to consider having an outside chance of upsetting the odds. Bordeaux may be a side with European pedigree but, in lying 15th in their league and having lost key attacker Pauleta to Paris Saint-Germain, they appear in decline. As a result the Hearts players, ‘homecoming’ Jean-Louis Valois in particular, will approach the tie with genuine relish.

"All the sides we could have drawn are European giants, with tremendous players and top-class players," Levein said. "We know that Bordeaux lost some players last year are in a transitional period. But they are a massive team and this is an incredible draw for us.

"We gained good experience in our ties against Zeljeznicar and I would like to think we can put that to good use, particularly in the first leg in France."

If any side can buck the embarrassing trend of non- Old Firm sides in Europe both falling at the early hurdles and failing to pull off anything in the way of shocks, then Hearts would seem to be the best bet.

In 1988/89 they reached the quarter-finals in the UEFA Cup, the best showing of a club in this competition until Celtic reached the final last year and as recently as 2000-01, they came within a whisker of eliminating Stuttgart in the first round of the UEFA Cup, exiting on the away goals rule. Two years earlier they were desperately unlucky to lose out 2-1 on aggregate in the first round of the Cup-Winners’ Cup to eventual finalists Real Mallorca.

Judicious use and rearing of young players has helped Hearts play with a fearlessness across the continent, and this quality characterised the display of Patrick Kisnorbo in the Bosnian capital in midweek. The defender produced his best display for the club he left his native Australia to join in the summer.

Now, though, it has emerged that Hearts could be without him for the month of January, as the player has been called up to spend a month with the Socceroos’ under-23 squad in their winter training camp. Kisnorbo is in a quandary whether to make the trip and potentially jeopardise his first-choice status at Tynecastle Stadium.

"He’s of a mind that he doesn’t know whether going to the other side of the world for four or five weeks at a crucial time in his footballing career is the right thing to do," said Levein. "That is down to him. If he wants to go, he’ll go with our backing and then he can fight for his place when he comes back."

Kisnorbo echoed his boss’s views, saying: "I signed for Hearts and that’s my No.1 priority, I’ve got to prove I’m worth a permanent spot in the team here. But as the day gets closer I’m thinking more about the Australian thing and whether I can go or not. If I do go I’ll be going for a month, the whole of January."

Were the club to be involved in a UEFA Cup fourth-round tie in February, however, the full-back might think twice about a New Year homecoming.

Taken from the Scotsman