Mark McGhee and Motherwell let their stylish football do the talking

They turned the final pages of the Phil O’Donnell tragedy in this deeply moving scene at Tynecastle. Motherwell lived to fight another day in the Scottish Cup, but not before their players rallied heroically from two goals down, in front of a passionate frieze of 3,400 visiting supporters who filled one end of the stadium and roused their team into their second-half fightback.

You had to have a heart of stone not to be moved by it. This was Motherwell’s first return to action since O’Donnell collapsed to his death 14 days earlier, and Mark McGhee’s players performed their own commemoration of their lost captain, embracing each other and bowing their heads in front of their supporters moments before kick-off.

It was the perfect symbolic act offootball – a team and a township united as one – and it brought a lump to the throat.

Robbed of a favourite son in such ashocking way, Motherwell’s players and supporters, just like the rest of us, have suddenly had to stop and ask themselves what is of ultimate value. But football as a business goes on and, by heavens, McGhee’s men played some lovely stuff.

Hearts were two goals to the good through strikes from Deividas Cesnauskis and Andrius Velicka but Stevie Frail’s men found themselves being pulled all over the park by Motherwell’s slick, brisk passing. Ultimately, Hearts simply couldn’t cope.

By the time Chris Porter struck home the second of his goals after 77 minutes to pull Motherwell level at 2-2 that great bank of Lanarkshire men and women behind Eduardas Kurskis’s goal were roaring in celebration and almost beside themselves in disbelief. It would be trite, in such circumstances, to cite “the spirit of Phil O’Donnell” but let’s just say he would have loved this.

What a day it was for Motherwell, a club we now know to have a real humanity and community kinship written right through it. As if to top it all, their football under McGhee this season has been on the high side of sophisticated, and here was further proof. Even when two goals down, Motherwell refused to panic, but instead kept passing and probing remorselessly.

“When you are two down as we were and then get a result like this, it’s great for me as the coach,” McGhee said afterwards. “We talk of teams like Arsenal or Manchester United, because that is the way to play football. My players believe in what they are doing and I think they believe in me as their coach.”

We should maybe put a cap on the endless tributes to McGhee’s own conduct of these past two weeks: he has led his club impeccably in its mourning, but enough of that. Instead, McGhee the football manager can be an immensely proud man these days because his team play a brand of football that makes you want to turn up at the turnstile and dig into your pocket for cash.

Notwithstanding O’Donnell’s loss, this is one of the sweetest Motherwell sides in years. Their football is precise and economical, a rich weave of passes, built around players such as Stephen Hughes, Ross McCormack and Keith Lasley. McGhee has told his players to trust in themselves and let the ball do the work, and the upshot is a footballing team in the true sense. Lasley, who had the awkward job of filling O’Donnell’s shoes on Saturday, was heroic, hard as well as skilled.

And at this rate McCormack, alas to say it, will not be at Fir Park for too much longer. Yet again on Saturday he was a force for change in his own right, either dribbling past Hearts players at will or hounding them into errors as Motherwell surged back into contention. What a wonderful, almost spicy little footballer McCormack is. He is a catalyst for his team, just like the dry, sometimes comical McGhee in the dugout.

Pity the poor Heart of Midlothian, a club which hosted this cup tie with a fine sensitivity, including the publication of a commemorative match programme in O’Donnell’s honour, but who were on every neutral’s wish-list as a defeated team here.

So when Hearts went 2-0 up after 52 minutes through Cesnauskis’s stabbed shot and then a fine Velicka run and finish, the game seemed sewn up for the home side. With Ruben Palazuelos and Michael Stewart driving Hearts in midfield, and with the marauding, machine-like Velicka spreading his alarm in attack, it seemed that Hearts would win the day.

Yet Motherwell, even when two goals down, had always had an eye-catching menace and their first response after 64 minutes summed up their football. They simply knifed through Hearts down the inside-left channel – first through Hughes, then Lasley and then McCormack in the build-up – before Porter tapped in. Moments earlier Audrius Ksanavicius had missed from six yards out for Hearts, but with Porter’s goal came Motherwell’s inevitable and rousing comeback.

After 77 minutes the visitors were again all over Hearts, zipping the ball from feet to feet. McCormack fed Lasley down the right, and the cross again met Porter, whose shot this time reared up and flew past Kurskis inside his right post.

Down there in front of their supporters, Porter was mobbed by his teammates while all hell erupted behind that goal.

It proved impossible, in the aftermath, not to place the game and the occasion in the context of the late O’Donnell. “We just wanted to focus on the game – we had a job to do, it’s the Scottish Cup, and we had to get back to normality,” Paul Quinn, the new Motherwell captain, said.

“Once we scored there was only one team going to get another, and it was us. I think Phil would be a happy man up there with our fighting spirit to get back to 2-2. It has been hard for all of us, hard not to walk on eggshells in front of Davie Clarkson [O’Donnell’s nephew]. But the truth is, Davie’s handled it all brilliantly for a guy of his age.”

This was a match which will be remembered and savoured for years wherever Motherwell fans are gathered.

Hearts

4-4-1-1

E Kurskis 5 R Neilson Y 5 C Karipidis 6 C Berra 6 J Goncalves 6 D Cesnauskis 5 M Stewart Y 6 R Palazuelos 7 A Driver 5 A Ksanavicius 4 A Velicka 7 Substitutes S Mikoliunas (for Cesnauskis, 75min), L Wallace (for Driver, 76), M Pospisil (for Ksanavicius, 86) Not used H Bjornsson, E Jonsson.

Motherwell

4-3-1-2

G Smith 5 P Quinn Y 6 S Craigan Y 6 M Reynolds 7 J Paterson 7 K Lasley 8 S Hughes 6 S McGarry 5 R McCormack 8 C Porter 8 D Clarkson 6 Substitutes D Smith 5 (for McGarry, 63min), M Fitzpatrick (for Clarkson, 89) Not used C Meldrum, B McLean, J Murphy.

Referee S Dougal

Attendance13,651