Balde takes heart from rise of Celtic — and Strachan's tuition

The song of praise may have seemed odd, coming on the eve of the today’s crucial Bank of Scotland Premierleague encounter between the clubs. Yet the pair genuinely believe that the Edinburgh side are not a flash in the pan and now possess genuine title credentials.

George Burley’s side come to Celtic Park to face their fiercest test yet. The leaders protect a three-point advantage after leaping ahead of the pack with eight straight wins — including success over Rangers at Tynecastle — and a draw in their first nine games. “I’m not kidding around when I say Hearts are a good side,” Strachan said. “That’s what I will be telling my team right before kick-off.

“Hearts have answered every question that has been asked of them this season. They beat Rangers for the first time in a while and then a fortnight ago they came back from 2-0 down at Falkirk to get a point. That’s what potential champions do.”

Balde, who has seen more of Hearts than his manager because of his four-year stay in Scotland, endorses that belief. “You can see the progress Hearts have made,” the Guinea player said. “Every year they were fighting for third place and although they went down to fifth last season, now they have some new players — if they believe in themselves anything is possible.

“I have not been surprised by their start. They have always been trying to get in front of Celtic and Rangers since I came here from France. Games against them have always been tight. I expect nothing other than a tough game this time. They look very strong and played well recently against Rangers but now they will be under more pressure because everyone is trying to beat them.”

That was where the Strachan-Balde duet went slightly off-key. The manager is more shrewd than his player. It is not winning in the east end of Glasgow that is the hard thing — Hearts managed that last season under John Robertson — but it is doing so when under the burden of expectation. Strachan knows that but he was not willing to publicly own up to it.

He faced a similar test as a player in the Leeds United side that won the English title in 1992. The Elland Road side were as unfancied as Hearts are. Winning at venues such as Old Trafford and Anfield had been achieved before, but it was being able to do so when in pursuit of the holy grail that marked out Strachan’s old side as champions-in-waiting.

“When I came to Celtic Park as a player with Aberdeen, you knew that this was a platform and that you wanted to play on these places,” the present Celtic manager said, recollecting the early 1980s and his part in shaping another side to break the Old Firm duopoly in the past, the vintage Aberdeen of Sir Alex Ferguson’s era. “This is still a platform to inspire visiting players,” Strachan added.

However, it has been a very uninspiring piece of grass not that far from Celtic Park that Strachan has used to inspire the best out of Balde. Celtic’s dog-eared training ground at Barrowfield, just half a mile along the road from where Britain’s biggest crowd of the weekend will gather today, was the place where Balde was given the chance to save his Celtic career.

The defender paid the price for the humiliating 5-0 defeat by Artmedia Bratislava in the second qualifying round of the Champions League. Balde, who had spent all summer talking to clubs from Germany, England and France, seemed to have his mind elsewhere.

Strachan cleared it in an instant by dropping him for the opening match of the Premierleague season. The 4-4 draw with Motherwell, though, did not vindicate Balde and even though Strachan brought him into the side, the flawed centre-back was forced to undergo special defensive tuition every afternoon. The reward has come in a six-game unbeaten run since the Old Firm defeat at Ibrox in August that has taken Celtic into second place.

Balde — whose flirtation with a move even took him on a plane back to Marseilles to speak with his hometown club — was shown remarkable patience by the Celtic fans during that period. “I do not worry about what people think,” Balde said. “When you are loyal on the pitch, as I was, then they give that back to you.

“We had a new manager, new players and a new system at the start of the season. You cannot expect a team to be at its best at the very start but now we know each other better. We have more training sessions together. Gordon Strachan has coached all the players at the back. The manager wanted me to consider more how I used the ball. Spending 20 minutes every time after training was no problem. I like working harder.”

It was Balde’s long-term partner, Stanislav Varga, who has paid the biggest price for Strachan’s ruthless approach to his defensive problem. The Slovakia captain was no better on that ignominious night in his homeland and then was culpable at Fir Park, three days after the horror show of Bratislava. Stephen McManus has taken Varga’s place. “He is progressing very well,” Balde declared. “He is a young player who wants to learn and he is going to be a good player.”

Ironically, Balde might have left the Celtic scene altogether had John Kennedy not suffered such misfortune. The young defender deputised so well for Balde in February 2004 when the latter went to play in the African Nations Cup that Kennedy played in the Nou Camp as Celtic knocked Barcelona out of the Uefa Cup and was then swiftly capped by Berti Vogts: his Scotland debut lasted just 12 minutes after a stamp from Romania’s Ion Ganea tore his knee ligaments.

Kennedy has spent 20 months trying to rebuild his fitness for a long-awaited comeback. That was cruelly taken away from him on Thursday when he injured his knee again in training — on the very day that Celtic had called a press conference to announce the youngster was being given a new contract. “John is distraught and so are his family,” Strachan said yesterday. “Footballers are often hard people and so are the dressing-rooms but yesterday the mood in ours was down because of what happened to John. He is well liked and it affected every one.”

Kennedy will travel to Colorado tomorrow and will meet his surgeon who will tell the Scotland player the extent of the fresh ligament damage. “John has been to the limit, mentally, over the last two seasons and to have go through it again is dreadful,” Strachan said. One suspects that the collective will of the Celtic dressing-room will be to defeat Hearts today and send Kennedy off with proof of another comeback — their own.

Taken from timesonline.co.uk