Kurskis blunders to rescue Gers' week

Patrick Glenn at Ibrox
Sunday December 16, 2007
The Observer

Rangers ended a bad week with a good result, but not even their most immovable apologists will argue that it was achieved impressively. Having been emphatically the better side before the interval and taken the lead through the first of Lee McCulloch's two goals, they went into decline after Andrius Velicka's equaliser and had to rely on a dreadful blunder by Eduardas Kurskis, the Hearts goalkeeper, for their late winner.

That opening goal from McCulloch was an utterly merited return for a home side who had been dominant to the point of oppressiveness from the earliest moments of the match. It was as if they were propelled by the quest for redemption after the embarrassing Champions League defeat by Lyon in midweek.

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Exerting pressure going forward, Rangers were so distinctly the more ambitious side that they restricted Hearts to a solitary break that carried even the slightest hint of a threat through the entire first half.

It was not the first time Hearts had appeared so meek at Ibrox, a stadium they seem to find much less conducive to the production of their optimum work than Celtic Park, the home of the other half of the Old Firm. But Hearts' soundest form this season - apart from the early humiliation of the 5-0 defeat by the champions - had come in their other three meetings with the big Glasgow clubs, which had yielded two wins and a draw in the SPL and the League Cup.

They were conspicuously unsound in defence, however, when McCulloch scored. Charlie Adam's cross from the left was competed for by Jose Goncalves and Kris Boyd, who collided as the Hearts defender headed the ball into the air. As the ball dropped, three Hearts players stood and watched as McCulloch burst forward, quickly controlled the ball and finished expertly with a clipped left-foot drive high to the left of Kurskis.

Steven Naismith, making a rare start as manager Walter Smith dispensed with the 4-1-4-1 formation favoured for Europe and fielded a more cavalier 4-4-2, should have given Rangers the advantage earlier, but he sliced wide after receiving Alan Hutton's centre from the right about 12 yards out.

All of this made Hearts' equaliser the more astonishing. Even during the 11 second-half minutes that preceded it, there had been no suggestion of an imminent change in the pattern of the match. The visitors had remained tentative, despite having replaced the ineffective Saulius Mikoliunas with Kestutis Ivaskevicius at half time.

They scored with their first authentic opportunity, Velicka rising above all challenges to meet a free-kick from Andrew Driver on the right and send the header past the previously untroubled Allan McGregor from eight yards.

It was quite typical of the curious decisions made by the Hearts management team these days that Velicka should be removed - replaced by Christian Nade - within five minutes of delivering the equaliser. But the goal seemed to transform Hearts, in terms of their spirit and the general standard of their play. There was a previously unsuspected fluency about their passing and movement that took them into threatening areas more often in the subsequent minutes than they had managed in all the time that had gone before.

Rangers, predictably, began to look uncertain for the first time, particularly in the vicinity of their goalkeeper, and, although there were no glaring opportunities, the visitors were often enough in the kinds of positions from which they could have inflicted further damage.

As it transpired, they did the ultimate damage to themselves. Or, at least, their goalkeeper did. Adam's free-kick from the right was cut back to Hutton, who seemed to miscue a drive that would have gone wide had it not reached the feet of McCulloch.

The striker's mishit was even more untidy, slicing the ball into the air, from where it would fall into the arms of the goalkeeper. Except that, when Kurskis reached out to complete the simple catch, he allowed the ball to escape and drop over the line.

Taken from the Guardian/Observer