Hearts 2 Partick Thistle 1: Hearts survive Thistle jag

Thistle were also denied earlier by a wonderful Gordon save after Billy Gibson’s blast following a free-kick was heavily deflected. Kenny Arthur, Gordon’s opposite number, described it as the “best save I have seen in any game I have played in” but Gordon wasn’t even sure if it was his best of the season, mentioning one against Motherwell, before running us through it matter-of-factly. “It was going low to my left and I think it hit Edgar (Jankauskas) who was on the end of our wall,” he said. “I just managed to move my body weight and get a decent hand to it.”

That save came on the hour and if Thistle had cancelled out Jankauskas’s header then, they might have gone on to provide yet another shock for the tournament. As it was, they were soon in further arrears when Cesnauskis cut in from the right past two flimsy challenges and arrowed a shot with his weaker left foot high into the top corner. Redolent of Kenny Dalglish against Spain in 1984? Mibbes aye, mibbes naw. Jim Duffy certainly wasn’t about to make the comparison. “If you expect me to compare Deividas Cesnauskis to Kenny Dalglish...,” he said, his eyebrows arching halfway up his forehead.

Hearts’ director of football did the post-match with a much lighter touch than is the wont of Graham Rix, who was rushing off to a catch a flight to England. The closing stages of this game must have added more creases to his already careworn face and, as Duffy admitted afterward, the introduction of Christophe Berra as a third centre-back was necessary to see Hearts safely through to tomorrow’s semi-final draw.

Dick Campbell’s gums were bumping slightly, meanwhile, as he pronounced himself “pig sick” and said he did not want his team to be “glorious losers”. Only a garish kit, with more colours than one of Noel Edmonds’s jumpers, let Thistle down in front of their impressively large support thogh.

Yet initially it seemed they would be crushed. Paul Hartley set a tone of aggression for Hearts with some smart midfield play and curled in a wicked cross from the left with his right foot after six minutes that was nodded in by Jankauskas. However, with Billy and Jimmy Gibson, the cousins in the centre of Thistle’s midfield, getting to grips, sometimes literally, with Hartley and Julien Brellier, the visitors gradually came into the game as Stephen McConalogue and Strachan fizzed crosses to the near post that Andy Webster and Pressley had to deal with. Hearts, meanwhile, fell into lethargy. Jankauskas might have pulled them out of it if he had glanced a cross from Cesnauskis home rather than wide, but Thistle bludgeoned openings of their own. McConalogue should have perhaps scored when Paul Ritchie’s knockdown bounced invitingly in front of him in the Hearts box, then Scott Boyd, on loan from Livingston and perhaps a better defender than those left to John Robertson by Paul Lambert, plopped a header narrowly wide. The fact that the entire Hearts team was sent out for a brisk half-time warm-up suggested that Rix had noticed the creeping malaise in his side.

Thistle came again after Cesnauskis’s goal, spurred on by the sending off of Hearts substitute Roman Bednar. Already booked for obstructing a free-kick, Bednar was then sent off for diving in Thistle’s box after nipping the ball round the advancing Arthur. It looked the correct decision by Craig Thomson, who refereed well, despite the shrugs of disbelief that Bednar aimed at his dugout as he ambled off.

Partick continued to push but Saulius Mikoliunas should have made it a hat-trick of Lithuanian scorers when Hartley picked him out at the near post only for the habitual dilettante to head wide. Bednar is now out of the semi-final, as is Brellier after a handball during those final fraught moments, but Hearts are still inching toward the trophy needed to sate their owner’s ambitions.

STAR MAN: Mark Roberts (Partick)

Player ratings. Hearts: Gordon 7, Neilson 6, Pressley 6, Webster 6, Fyssas 6, Cesnauskis 7 (Berra 83min, 6), Brellier 6, Hartley 7, Skacel 5 (Mikoliunas 68min, 5), Elliot 5 (Bednar 62min, 3), Jankauskas 6

Partick: Arthur 6, Murray 6, Smyth 6, Boyd 7, Hodge 7, Roberts 8, J Gibson 7, W Gibson 7, Strachan 6, Ritchie 6 (Brady 63min, 6), McConalogue 6 (Gillies 57min, 7)

Booked: McConalogue 42, Murray 55, Bednar 64, Boyd 78, Brellier 90

Sent off: Bednar 73

Referee: C Thomson

Attendance: 16,365

Taken from timesonline.co.uk