Pars get their own back

JIM KEAN AT EAST END PARK

Dunfermline 2
Derek Young (21), Wilson (62)

Hearts 1
Maybury (41)

Referee: C Richmond.
Attendance: 6,199

WHEN you’ve flirted with fame, it can’t be easy to go back to being a nonentity, so hopefully Dunfermline’s new plastic pitch isn’t tearing itself apart this morning wondering where it all went wrong.

The much maligned artificial turf has been the number one topic of conversation after games at East End Park for months now, but it didn’t rate as much as a mention here, which perhaps goes to show that when two teams are going hammer and tongs at each other, the surface they’re doing it on becomes of secondary importance.

For the fourth match in a row, Hearts ended up on the losing side, although Craig Levein neither looked nor sounded like a man who has lost the plot, and his assertion that his team did everything they could was a hard one to argue with.

Crucially, the one thing they didn’t do was score enough goals, but while the Jambos’ inability to come up with an equaliser eventually ensured all their hard work met with no reward, their failure to adequately defend the Fifers’ second was every bit as significant in the loss of all three points.

That the home side won an encounter they didn’t really deserve to will be seen as no more than poetic justice by their fans who have in the past, suffered the opposite fate in this fixture, and while Jimmy Calderwood was honest enough to concede the result flattered his side, he was also, quite rightly, happy enough to accept the victory.

As is usual when these two meet, there always seemed to be a little bit of needle bubbling gently under the surface but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as the referee can keep the lid on it, a task our man in black struggled to perform, and if the sign of a good ref is that he can upset both sets of players and fans in equal measure, Charlie Richmond had a stormer. Which he didn’t!

Not even some of the strange decisions he came up with, however, prevented the 90 minutes from being one of the better adverts for the Scottish game, although those who wonder why football north of the Border is in such dire straits need only look at a crowd of just over 6,000 for a game involving two of the top-five teams in the SPL.

The rapid approach of Christmas notwithstanding, that figure sucks.

Those who did show up saw the home side go ahead courtesy of a cleverly worked opener which started with Stevie Crawford neatly back heeling the ball into the path of Derek Young and ended with the former Aberdeen man notching his second goal in two games with a powerful finish.

Hearts’ strike was also a well-worked affair, with the home defence apparently bracing themselves for another high ball into the box only for Paul Hartley to roll his free-kick to Alan Maybury, who was later to be denied another equaliser when his shot came back off the bar, and we were back to square one.

Graham Weir had a great chance to put the visitors in front shortly after the break when clean through on Derek Stillie, and while the goalkeeper did well to push the striker’s shot to safety, the Hearts man should have scored.

For the winner, Craig Gordon looked as if he was going to come for a Darren Young free-kick only to change his mind, and with no-one else marking him, Scott Wilson had plenty of time and space to head home.

Had Steven Pressley been there, Elvis’s ex-Rangers colleague might not have enjoyed quite so much freedom but Levein refused to fall back on the absence of his captain, and that of Mark De Vries, as an excuse for the defeat.

"We had a team out who were good enough to win the match and the boys gave it everything they had. It’s hard to take, but while we’ve had a poor run of results, I don’t think we’ve had a poor run of form," said the Tynecastle coach who, given the way his luck has been running recently, opted against buying a lottery ticket on Saturday night.

Who knows, maybe he’ll still "win" some of Leslie Deans’ £10million.

Taken from the Scotsman