Hearts beat slowly but earn Rix a draw

“We didn’t pass the ball well,” he said, “and we didn’t win any second balls. Maybe it was the media hype over this game or because they have a new coach. But if we play like that at Motherwell for 45 minutes we could go three or four goals down.”

Rix was relieved that the heated reception he might have anticipated because of a jail sentence for misdemeanours relating to an under-age girl did not materialise. “It was important for me to get the first game out of the way,” he said. “It could have affected the guys, everything that’s gone off the last ten days. It probably looked that way in the first half, but in the end I saw a lot of good things.”

The home side sped into a thirteenth-minute lead via the enterprising Jamie Smith, who fired home a low ball from Scott Muirhead. The visiting side may have been stunned, but, in terms of effort, it did not show and they came close to leveling the score on two occasions, the first when Skacel made capital of indecision by Russell Anderson and the second when Edgaras Jankauskas prepared to pull the trigger 12 yards out. This time it was Barry Nicholson who heroically blocked the effort.

Zander Diamond, though, lost out on a tussle for a high ball with Jankauskas and when it dropped for Skacel, the Czech’s strike hit Gary Dempsey’s boot and sailed into the net in the 64th minute, giving the Hearts player his eleventh goal of the season.

In the end, satisfaction was expressed in both camps that a draw had been achieved. “I was very happy with the performance,” Jimmy Calderwood, the Aberdeen manager, said, “and at the end I said to Graham ‘welcome to Scotland’ because it was like a cup-tie. I don’t know if it was a high-quality football game but it was certainly a battle.”

Taken from timesonline.co.uk