UP HELL STRUGGLE

HEARTS will board a flight to Hell this morning and I for one would like to wish them good luck. They're going to need it.

The task facing them, in a purely footballing context, is already a huge one after that 2-1 defeat at Murrayfield in the first leg.

To be honest, having watched that game and also Saturday's 2-1 defeat at Ibrox I don't hold out a great deal of hope for their chances of making the Champions League.

In fact, in all honesty I'd be flabbergasted if their name makes it into the hat for the draw for the group stages in Monte Carlo on Thursday.

I hope I end up with egg on my face but Hearts have a mountain to climb and having seen them a couple of times this season, I don't think they're up to it.

Losing two goals in the last five minutes of the first leg was a disaster but Hearts would have been guilty of robbery had they clung on to their 1-0 lead.

I was also hugley disappointed in them at Ibrox at the weekend and it's left me wondering if they will be able to make any kind of challenge at the top of the table this year.

They are obviously missing Paul Hartley badly and the good news is he's on his way back to fitness. But they are also without two other key players from last season - Andy Webster and Rudi Skacel - and these guys are gone for good.

I really did think they would make it a three-horse race once again this season but I'm starting to worry that the Edinburgh outfit might be left behind in the stalls.

Time will tell and obviously Hartley will have a big influence when he's back to full fitness but for the time being these are certainly worrying times for the Tynecastle team and their supporters.

And if they were worried at Ibrox just wait until they get off that plane in Athens!

This trip is going to be a real eye-opener both for some of the players and for the supporters who follow them to watch AEK.

At Rangers we made the same trip to play against the same team in the same stage of the same competition under Walter Smith 12 years ago and it was an experience I'll remember for the rest of my life.

In fact, what goes on inside and outside stadiums in countries like Greece and Turkey is absolutely disgraceful and it's high time the authorities took a serious look at.

It's ironic that the whole world is talking about the indiscipline inside Scottish football grounds at a time when if there are two arrests made at any one match, it's a major deal.

UEFA and FIFA, meanwhile, are poring over every word sung by Scottish fans and threatening withering sanctions against any club whose supporters are guilty of causing offence.

Now we all realise we do have a problem in this country and the clubs are working harder than ever to make such chanting a things of the past.

But when I played in Athens they were launching bottles at us on the pitch and I can't remember the authorities clambering over themselves to do anything about that.

In our country fans aren't allowed to take flags with sticks into the ground. In Greece they take flame throwers and flares into the terraces and no one bats an eyelid. It's so ludicrous it makes me laugh.

There is a serious case of double standards going on here and it's about time the powers that be took their heads out of the sand.

I'll be honest. When we played AEK I absolutely loved the atmosphere but there was a whole lot going on which would have caused an absolute uproar had it happened in Scoland.

We didn't find it initimidating - we actually relished going into madhouses like that - but the locals certainly THOUGHT they were intimidating us.

On the way into the ground that night in Athens there were thousands of AEK supporters lining the streets, booting our bus and making gestures about slitting our throats.

I'm not sure that Ian Durrant making faces at them did anything to calm the situation but it was certainly an attempt by the locals to frighten us and create a very sinister mood. We were all big boys and we could handle that. In fact, we laughed at it to be honest.

But I also saw the other side of the coin a couple of years ago when I went to Athens as a supporter to see Rangers play Panathanaikos in the Champions League.

Excuse the French but we were treated like absolute sh**inside that stadium. The Greeks were throwing all sorts at us, taunting us and generally being obnoxious in the extreme.

They started chucking bottles of beer and bottles full of urine at us and I have to say their p*** tasted marginally better than their lager!

But it was absolutely outrageous what the Rangers supporters were subj ected to and I fear the Hearts fans will come in for similar treatment tomorrow night.

Someone somewhere at the top level of this game has his priorities all wrong when they're jumping all over Scottish supporters for singing songs and at the same time turning a blind eye to the far more extreme problems in places like Greece and Turkey.

What is it they say about sticks and stones?

Taken from the Daily Record