Hearts ready to gamble on Hartley

VALDAS Ivanauskas is prepared to chance everything on the fitness of Paul Hartley tonight as Hearts try to turn around a 2-1 deficit in their Champions League third-round qualifying tie here against AEK Athens.

The coach is wary of expecting too much of the Scotland midfielder as he makes his way back from injury, and will not expect Hartley to last the 90 minutes, but he does know that the playmaker represents Hearts' best chance of staging an improbable comeback in the cauldron of the Olympic Stadium, where temperatures will still be close to 40C when the match kicks off at 9:45pm local time (7:45pm BST) tonight.

Indeed, without Hartley and Bruno Aguiar, who is suspended after being sent off at Murrayfield, Hearts would find it extremely difficult to create enough chances to get back into the game.

Even an hour's play from Hartley might just create the opportunities required to restore Hearts' hopes of reaching the group stages, especially with Julien Brellier - an absentee from the first leg because of a virus - back to anchor the midfield.

Ivanauskas said last night that, while a final decision on selection would be made after training in the Olympic Stadium, it was probable he would be in the starting 11. "My feeling now is 'yes, he will start'," said the coach, who earlier had cautioned against expecting too much of a player who was out of action for months with a troublesome groin condition.

"Twenty minutes against Rangers and 45 minutes against Gretna was OK, but this is a difficult game and we will have a discussion with Paul after training. The chance is great, but he must be very fit physically and mentally. He is ready for every fight, but we need to be very careful for the future."

Steven Pressley, the club captain, later added that he saw the probable return of Hartley as much more of a boost than a gamble. "I don't perceive it being a risk," the centre-back said. "Paul will not play unless he believes he is ready. As everybody knows he is a key player for the team and it will be great to see him back."

Pressley knows that his side are up against it here, and that an early goal for AEK could be enough to seal the tie. Referring to recent away performances, however, he said he believed the team had the spirit to stage the fightback required.

"I'd imagine they'd look to kill the tie off very early. Very few people gave us a hope when we went out to Bordeaux or Basel, but we had a fantastic performances on those nights."

Hearts won 1-0 in the French town - albeit they lost the return leg of the UEFA Cup match 2-0 - and won 2-1 in Basel in the group stages of the same competition a year later. If they do lose tonight, they will fall into the first round proper of the UEFA Cup - one tie away from those group stages.

But they are at least in better fettle for this evening's game than they were for the first leg, when the late withdrawal of both Brellier and Deividas Cesnauskis disrupted their preparations. The most notable absentee tonight will be the in-form Roman Bednar, who has a foot injury and did not travel, but Ivanauskas can choose from Calum Elliot, Juho Makela, Jamie Mole and even Mauricio Pinilla to partner Edgaras Jankauskas up front.

Whatever the exact line-up, though, all will revolve around Hartley. He has been an invaluable player so often since joining the club, but, with a possible £6 million on offer to which club reaches the group stages, another superlative performance this evening could top anything he has done to date in maroon and white.

Hartley has been the centre of attention in more ways than one on this trip, as yesterday morning a newspaper said he had made a sectarian remark to a Millwall fanzine while on the books of the London club in the 1990s. Hearts yesterday issued a statement saying there was no truth in the story, claiming it was yet another attempt by the Glasgow-based media to derail the Romanov revolution.

"Paul Hartley utterly refutes the allegation that he made such remarks," read the statement from a club spokesman. "These comments come from an apparent interview given to an unofficial publication almost ten years ago, and has [sic] been picked up by a discreditable source before being distributed to a national newspaper.

"It is also interesting to note that yet again such a story is published on the eve of an important fixture involving Hearts and in particular that it features a high-profile player coming back from injury. Such attempts to discredit Paul will not succeed, and a number of Paul's friends and family are indeed Rangers fans. Paul Hartley has the complete backing of everyone at Heart of Midlothian Football Club. Hearts also stress that the club's players, directors and staff condemn all forms of sectarianism."

Over the past few weeks, Ivanauskas has faced pressure of a different sort, with barely a day going by without a claim appearing somewhere that he is on the verge of losing his job. Such claims have continued to appear despite a statement some weeks ago by Hearts owner Vladimir Romanov that he would not review the progress of the coaching team until mid-season.

This week, in a no doubt forlorn attempt to get the message through, Romanov said the coach continued to have his support, and that the situation with Ivanauskas at the helm was different from that under his sacked predecessors, George Burley and Graham Rix.

"I have full confidence in the Lithuanian coach. Last season I fired people who put their own interests ahead of the club's. I cannot in any way say that about Valdas Ivanauskas.

"I think it is now time to stop this business of raising the question after each game of whether he is going to be sacked. We're building the team, we're working for the future. Ivanauskas is crucial to this process and knows he has my strong backing. The aim is to create a team to break the football duopoly in Scotland."

A victory tonight, and the financial boost it brings, would go a certain way towards at least denting that duopoly.

Taken from the Scotsman