Bad blood and faint Hearts

This gruelling battle at Tynecastle had a bitter vein running through it from start to finish and, ultimately, Rangers survived the bad blood better than Hearts. Nacho Novo's goal after 78 minutes separated the teams in a match in which the referee, Dougie McDonald, hared around the pitch doling out yellow cards in the face of screaming spectators.

There is something about the air inside Tynecastle when either of the Old Firm come to town. The arrival of the Glasgow hordes makes an already inflamed Hearts support even more animated, and the atmosphere yesterday inside the tight stadium was rancid at times. It has to be said that this was due in part to a Hearts faithful increasingly reaching their wits' end.

Their club is in turmoil. Yesterday the confusing spectacle of Eduard Malofeev, a coach who is about to be binned by a martinet called Vladimir Romanov, trying and failing to organise a cogent challenge to Rangers was abject to behold. This result meant Hearts have drawn twice and lost four in six matches under Malofeev.

In a series of nightmare scenarios, there was worse for Hearts yesterday. With Steven Pressley still being frozen out by Romanov, two other Hearts players, Nerijus Barasa and Saulius Mikoliunas, were booed by sections of the

home support, resulting in the undignified scene of Alex Koslovski, a Hearts sporting director, accusing the Tynecastle faithful of racism.

"I'm surprised Nerijus was [booed] because he played very well," said Koslovski. "It was the same for Mikoliunas when he came on and I was surprised by the fans. I think it may be a little bit of discrimination . . . or it looks like it because they are Lithuanian."

Paul Le Guen heaved a

sigh of relief after a frenetic encounter. The games in France surely don't have this degree of brawn and passion and sometimes you can almost see the Frenchman peering out in disbelief from his dugout. His team still lag 15 points behind Celtic in the Premierleague but at least Le Guen has now managed two successive SPL victories.

"We still need to keep our humility," said the Rangers coach afterwards, offering an intriguing note of decorum. Like the Hearts fans, it's almost as if Le Guen is never sure what his team will do next, though Rangers can now to go to Auxerre for UEFA Cup business on Thursday in good spirit.

On top of everything, this game was temporarily halted midway through the second half when a missile was thrown onto the pitch near Craig Gordon from the Rangers end. The standside linesman, who evidently saw the culprit, insisted on summoning the referee to the scene for consultation, and Mr McDonald in turn walked over and informed a nearby policeman about the incident. It was one more distraction on a hectic afternoon.

Hearts' play yesterday had zeal without containing any true finesse, and the hapless

figure of Malofeev on the Hearts bench appeared even more bewildered as the game went on. For some peculiar

reason, with Hearts chasing this game a goal behind with 12 minutes left, Malofeev chose to see out time with only one striker, Andrius Velicka, standing in the Rangers half. In Edgaras Jankauskas, an unused Hearts substitute, Malofeev appeared ignorant of the potential to bring damage in the closing stages.

Some of the fury of the Hearts support was triggered by the blatant possibility that this may well have been the result of confusion in the Hearts technical area. It is pitiful to watch Malofeev, a man with no English, bark instructions to John McGlynn, the Hearts coach, with Koslovski urgently acting as the translator between the two.

Is this really the way to run a football team? Little wonder at least one group of Hearts fans had altered their banner from "Vladimir Romanov" to "Vladimir Bugger Off".

On the field a bitter feud was finally broken by Novo's strike with 12 minutes remaining. The little Spaniard, frankly, had endured a barren afternoon, but this didn't stop him from racing from the half-way line before unleashing a shot past Gordon and inside his right post. The ball was aided past the goalkeeper via a deflection off Christophe Berra.

This Hearts plight was summed up in the picture of Pressley, the club captain, once more demoted to the bench. The persecution of this player by Hearts is embarrassing, and the supporters, once all-worshipping of Romanov and his ways, made their feelings known.

When Pressley trotted from the bench to do some first half limbering up behind a goal, the Hearts supporters greeted him like a vanquished emperor,

rising from their seats to a man to applaud their frozen-out captain. Mr Romanov, evidently, continues to take exception to Pressley's plea for sanity around the club three weeks ago, but the Hearts fans are increasingly taking exception to such a spectacle.

This was clearly no Hearts team of Malofeev, Koslovski, McGlynn or anyone else: it is Romanov, wherever he is in eastern Europe, again dictating via telephone and fax-machine. Yet at least Julien Brellier, another whom Romanov has know to take exception to in the past, was allowed to play yesterday. In Brellier, Bruno Aguiar and Paul Hartley the home side had a vigorous midfield which at one stage took this game to Rangers.

Both sides had opportunities, in Rangers' case with headers from Dado Prso and Alan Hutton, both of which just inched over Gordon's bar. Yet it was Hearts who played the more aggressively and dangerously in the first half, releasing Velicka into a series of openings from which he might have capitalised. Hearts, though, grew less effective as the game wore on

The second half became a fine, open contest with chances at both ends. Scarcely had the play re-started before Velicka, a man who knows his way to goal, was thundering down the Hearts right and unleashing a shot just wide. It was a ploy the striker was to try on a number of occasions. However, Barry Ferguson, excellent for Rangers throughout the game, inspired his team to a series of chances before Novo struck.

Taken from the Herald