Thistle edge it as Hearts lose their way on rare off-day

JIM KEAN AT FIRHILL

Partick Thistle 1
Thomson (49)

Hearts 0

Referee: A Freeland. Attendance: 4,043

THE recent proposal that schoolboy games should have their results re-written at half-time if they were too one-sided went down like a lead balloon, but it’s a suggestion that should not be dismissed out of hand.

Like many new ideas, it may be that it will just take time to grow on us, and with a little bit of tweaking, who knows, it might become one of the cornerstones of Scottish football legislation for years to come.

One piece of fine tuning worth looking at is this business of taking goals away from a team and making the score 0-0 again. If a referee can do that, why not go the whole hog and give him the clout to work his magic in the opposite direction as well?

Had Alan Freeland been blessed with such power here, he could have gone in at the break and told both sets of players that since what they had just served up had bored the pants off the meagre crowd, he was taking it upon himself to liven things up by giving one of them a goal of a start.

The ref could then have gone on to explain that, as the Jags already had the advantage of being at home, it was only fair to award said goal to the visitors and so the second half would have started with Hearts one up.

Whether that would have made things more interesting we’ll never know, but what we do know is that it was the only way the men from Tynecastle would ever have scored.

Hearts can readily be excused this lapse since they haven’t served up too many stinkers on their way to third spot in the SPL this season, but from an early stage it was clear they were in for one of those days which make you wish you’d just stayed in bed.

Thistle weren’t much better, so we were treated to 90 minutes of tedium played with a ball that seemed to possess a mind of its own, and to make matters worse, was in one of those bolshie moods when it stubbornly refused to do anything the players wanted it to.

That much of the talk in the home camp after the game centred on the fact that keeper Jamie Langfield hardly had a save to make summed things up, and, straight talking as ever, the Hearts coach conceded his team were going home with the result their performance merited.

"For a while it seemed the best we were looking at was nothing each but we made a mistake defensively and it cost us the match. Our quality was nowhere near what it should have been, we had too many players who didn’t perform to the level they can, and the creative part of our game was missing," admitted Levein.

One proviso to any assertion that his squad had more or less got what they deserved centred around the 50th-minute booking of Paul Hartley for simulation in the opposition box, a decision that was to deny Hearts a penalty they thought was more than justified and eventually lead to Hartley’s dismissal.

The midfielder’s late challenge on Jamie Mitchell which led to a second yellow and then a red minutes from time was just plain daft and he’ll rightly be disciplined for making it.

"I can’t blame the referee, although I’d like to," added Levein. "I can’t blame him for our midfield and attack not performing."

In the great scheme of things, however, the defeat is unlikely to cast any long-term shadow on Hearts’ aspirations, and fans needn’t return their passport to the back of the drawer.

It’s all too little too late for the Maryhill Magyars, of course, but the result was another indication that if they’re going to go down, they’ll do so fighting, taking the points this time courtesy of a long clearance from Langfield which skited off Steven Pressley’s head and allowed Andy Thomson to lob Craig Gordon.

According to Thomson’s striking partner James Grady, the goal at least ensured Thistle fans would enjoy their Saturday night although what would make them even more ecstatic would be the sight of Grady’s name on a new Firhill contract. Talks continue on that score.

"We all feel we should have more points on the board than we have," he said, "but the total we do have is embarrassing and from now until the end of the season we have to try and make it a wee bit more respectable."

Taken from the Scotsman