Stevie Frail ‘better off elsewhere’ as bizarre Hearts circus goes on

It is surely a troubling situation at any club when a prominent player and occasional team captain suggests that it may be a wise move for his first-team coach to leave. Yet that is what Robbie Neilson found himself reduced to saying yesterday as he tried to pick through the debris of Heart of Midlothian’s excruciating 2-1 defeat by Rangers at Ibrox on Saturday.

The blunder by Eduardas Kurskis , the third goalkeeper to be used by Hearts in the past five weeks , that gave Rangers their winning goal was bad enough, but Kurskis’s error said much more at Ibrox. Alas for Hearts, the incident spoke volumes once again about the weird and hapless manner in which the Gorgie team are being run.

Stevie Frail seems as decent and respected a figure as you’ll presently find in Scottish football, yet week in and week out we find this Hearts coach being reduced to awful scenes in front of the media, in which he has to justify decisions that are not his in the first place.

Clearly, at Ibrox, it had not been Frail’s desire or decision to play Kurskis, a man who cost Hearts at least a point with a shambolic display.

Neilson, speaking about the element of chaos that is forever dogging Hearts whenever progress looks like being made, went as far as to suggest that Frail, the mainstay of the club at this point in time, might be best escaping Tynecastle.

Asked about the rumour that Frail was on the short-list of candidates for the Dunfermline Athletic job, Neilson replied: “You’d need to ask Stevie about that, and it would be disappointing to lose him. He’s done a fantastic job at Hearts, so there’s going to be speculation about him. But that job at Dunfermline might be a good step for him to take.”

Hearts, having equalised Lee McCulloch’s first-half goal for Rangers through Andrius Velicka after 56 minutes, were landed in it when Kurskis, without even being challenged, failed to hold a simple, looping shot by McCulloch, and instead flapped the ball into the back of his own net.

Frail hinted strongly later that the decision to play Kurskis had neither been his nor had won his approval, but it was Neilson who expanded on the confusion being heaped on Hearts by the whims of the club’s owner, Vladimir Romanov, as well as an elusive coaching staff of Anatoly Korobochka and Alex Koslovski.

“It’s quite difficult for everyone here, but we all know the situation,” Neilson said. “The situation at the club right now is that you don’t really know what the team is going to be.

“There are a lot of changes every week. Last week, for instance, there were five or six changes made, not just in personnel, but in positional changes. But you’ve just got to play your game and try to get some consistency.”

On the absurdity of Kurskis being selected at Ibrox ahead of Steve Banks and Anthony Basso, both of whom had played recently, Neilson was notably blunt.

“It would be a problem for any team to have three different goalkeepers coming in, but the players haven’t got any influence on it at all,” he said. “It’s just a case of trying to deal with it.

“I’ve been lucky enough to play every game this season, but the majority of players have been in and out of the team. That is the problem. I think that, with the standard of player we have here, if we played a consistent team we’d do well.

“We have good players at Hearts , I think you could see that in different periods of the game at Ibrox. It’s just a case of trying to do it every week, but that has been difficult for us to do consistently.

“We all know the situation. We just accept it, because that’s the way it’s going to be. It’s up to the coaching staff to decide who’s going to play, and if you are selected, you just try to give 100 per cent.” Neilson expressed his dismay at the way this season is unfolding for Hearts, given the optimism that he and the players had felt back in August.

“Good players came to the club in the summer and, at the start of the season, I thought it would just be a case of gelling as a team,” he said. “But it has been difficult. We are sitting seventh or eighth in the league right now, and for a team of Hearts’ standing and the standard of player we’ve got, that isn’t good enough.

“It’s disappointing because we lost three top players [Paul Hartley, Steven Pressley and Craig Gordon] who would have been in the best XI in the SPL, so that was difficult. But times have moved on. What we have to do is try to get a settled team and start winning games. We’ve got good players, so we know we could play well.”

At Ibrox on Saturday evening, Frail was left yet again to bat away manfully in front of the media, while trying to explain the presence of Kurskis in the Hearts team. The 31-year-old goalkeeper , another of Romanov’s signings , did not seem good enough to be representing Hearts in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League.

Frail tried to be diplomatic but it was perfectly obvious how he felt about the situation. He also admitted that some aspects of the Hearts team selection were “difficult to defend”.

“I think it would be unfair of me to talk about the goalkeepers,” Frail said edgily. “Eduardas played today, but it is one of these situations which we need to sit down and look at. We need to make sure we have our best goalkeeper out there playing every week.

“Our three goalkeepers have played in the last six games between them, so it’s not great. Any player , goalkeeper or striker , needs to play regularly, so that could be a factor as well.

“It is difficult to answer these questions. We have three goalkeepers, and as I say, we need to make sure that, whoever is picking the team, we need to make sure it is the right one.

“It is as important a decision as your top striker, and when your goalkeeper makes a mistake, it can cost you the game.

“That’s what happened to us at Ibrox, and it is difficult to defend.”

Hearts’ next match is at home to Inverness Caley Thistle on Saturday. Craig Brewster’s team will go to Tynecastle scenting blood.

Taken from timesonline.co.uk