Are Hearts reaping the whirlwind of their Lithuanian links?

Just because Hearts are paranoid, it doesn't mean Scotland's not out to get them
Ewan Murray
February 1, 2008 12:35 PM

Having a persecution complex is not a useful thing, particularly when it takes the collective form of thousands of people screaming in disbelief inside a football ground every week. But as the saying goes: just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

Visits to Tynecastle have hardly been a bundle of laughs for Hearts supporters this season, their team struggling near the foot of the Scottish Premier League and already eliminated from the country's two cup competitions. Yet not content to vent their anger at underperforming players, maroon-clad punters have gone from furious towards bewildered at a series of incorrect calls from match officials.

One point must be made here - there is and should be no suggestion that referees in Scotland are corrupt, overtly biased or fixed in some time-honoured view that "Hearts must never succeed because their owner Vladimir Romanov has slagged off the Scottish Football Association a few times". However, what has been a sense of unfair treatment for months in Edinburgh's western outskirts is now, gradually, being accepted in wider circles.

The seeds of this present debate were sown last September, when the Hearts winger Saulius Mikoliunas launched himself over the leg of Darren Fletcher to win a penalty for Lithuania against Scotland at Hampden. It didn't cost Scotland the game, nobody can say whether a Scottish player would or would not do the same in similar circumstances, and Mikoliunas was not, crucially, playing for Hearts at the time. Finding room on the moral high-ground in the aftermath of the incident, though, was near-impossible.

Mikoliunas has subsequently been subjected to booing from opposition fans on his every appearance for his club this season, including, notably, Rangers supporters in a rare outbreak of Scottish nationalist sentiment on Wednesday evening.

Hearts' last six games, meanwhile, have proved intriguing. Three players booked for diving, Mikoliunas, Andrius Velicka and Deividas Cesnauskis (all Lithuanian), decisions each proven by television to be incorrect, while Rangers' Barry Ferguson was torn between playing basketball and football in setting up the opening goal of Wednesday's CIS Cup semi-final.

There has been a staggering bout of silence from the SFA's corridors of power inside Hampden Park since August 1, when they announced an apparently ground-breaking pilot scheme to retrospectively deal with diving in the Premier League. This process was supposed to take place behind closed doors before kicking in for real in the new year; can Mikoliunas, Velicka and Cesnauskis expect to have their yellow cards rescinded?

And the undertones are far more unedifying, often verging on xenophobia where apparently rounded commentators flippantly refer to "Lithuanians" and "cheating" as if the country teaches simulation at nursery school. A year ago, Falkirk's Darren Barr was sent-off following over-reaction from Velicka; an incident which once again prompted outrage in Scottish football circles. John Hughes, Falkirk's manager, went so far as to point out the completely irrelevant point that Barr was a "young Scottish player". A national sense of injustice was notable by its absence, though, in November as the Gretna defender Danny Grainger (a young, English player, in the interests of fairness), used an almost identical act of deceit to provoke a red card for Hearts' Michael Stewart. Hearts followers who, at that time, cried foul were accused of paranoia when they actually had a perfectly fair point; their team is reaping far more than Mikoliunas ever sowed.

Hearts have been poor, verging on woeful and often indisciplined at times this season, of that there can be no question. What is open to genuine conjecture is whether pre-conceived ideas, among referees in particular, have made the campaign worse.

The SFA, who have been swift to hit Romanov in the pocket for his outspoken comments about their organisation, could do worse than pay closer scrutiny to a series of decisions which are doing as little for the game as the Hearts owner's words of criticism.

Taken from the Guardian/Observer