Neilson insists stint at Queens shaped career

ROBBIE Neilson is not the first former Queen of the South player to lay claim to having Champions League experience but he is the only one to identify his time in Dumfries as a springboard towards participating in the club game's greatest tournament.

Neilson joins Andy Goram in the exclusive group. However, the former Rangers keeper ended up at Palmerston Park rather than using his time there to re-launch a career that is getting better and better for the Hearts full-back.

It might not be Champions League in the strictest sense, but on Wednesday night Neilson was part of the team which guided Hearts through a potentially tricky qualifying tie in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Earlier in the day he had received the news via a text message from a friend that he had been called up to the Scotland squad for the first time.

While the gathering in St Andrews later this month does not include a game, Walter Smith has signalled his awareness of Neilson's steadiness down the right for Hearts. And at least it is an excuse which takes Neilson away from his club on the kind of occasion which has proved a dispiriting experience for a player previously overlooked by Smith, and before him Berti Vogts.

"There are a lot of boys at Hearts involved and when they go away to Scotland games you are left on your own at training," he reflected yesterday. "We've got a lot of international players and, when one of those international weeks comes around, there are only about five of us left. It's not great. You'd rather be away with the rest of them, so it will be nice to do that." Neilson has been so far out of the international picture that he had not even realised a squad was being named this week. The ignorance is forgivable since the player was in Mostar when the news was broken to him, having just completed a guided tour of a place left cracked and broken by the war of 1992-95. His mind was preoccupied with notions of what that must have been like, as well as the up-coming match against NK Siroki Brijeg. Neilson only featured for an hour in the goal-less encounter, before he reluctantly gave way to Ibrahim Tall.

"'Wednesday was a nice day," he said. "I got called up to the training squad for Scotland, though my priority was still the Champions League. I got a text from somebody telling me I was in the squad which one of my friends sent. I didn't even know they were going away, to be honest. It was out of the blue.

"There are a lot of good players in this Scotland set-up and it's a hard group to get into," he continued. "Particularly under Walter Smith there hasn't been a lot of change, it's been very settled. But I've managed to play consistently well and, hopefully, I will be able to continue to do that."

Neilson acknowledged the part played by former Hearts manager Craig Levein in his promotion, and also the positive effect of a five-month stint at Queen of the South after appearing to lose his way at Hearts, the club he joined aged just 16.

"Which manager was I out of the team with? All of them," he laughed. "I got in under Jim Jefferies as a young boy, played a few games and then Craig Levein came in and I fell out of the team for a wee bit. I managed to get back in and I've never really looked back.

"I went out on loan to Queen of the South a few years ago. I tried to look at it as a springboard to get back into the Hearts team. Craig Levein spoke to me and said I could get first team football if I get really fit and came back trying to push into the team. He was as good as his word.

"It had been a big shock to be loaned out," he continued. "I had come into Hearts at 16, straight from school, and you get used to being at a big club with nice training facilities. To go down to a lower league was a real learning experience for me. But Queen of the South had a good set-up, even though they were part-time. It was a good opportunity for me.

"I was 21, things weren't happening for me and it really helped. I hope I am an example to some of the young boys now. It might be difficult for them to come into a team, especially at Hearts where there is money to spend to bring in players.

"But there are opportunities for boys like Calum [Elliot] and Lee [Wallace], fantastic players who can do a job. I think if they can work hard then they've got a great opportunity here."

Taken from the Scotsman