Spectacular fall from grace of poor Heart of Midlothian

Heart of Midlothian took summer football to new heights last July, when they played the most glamorous team in the world and drew 57,857 spectators to Murrayfield Stadium for a friendly match. When it came down to making a choice, many preferred watching Barcelona to being on the beach.

The Edinburgh club are already making plans for this summer. However, few Hearts fans will be willing to give up their holidays to see their team embrace a new horizon. Faced with the miserable prospect of no European football next season, after the wretched campaign of Steve Frail’s team, the Tynecastle owners are keen to enter the Intertoto Cup.

It is a long shot, aimed at securing entry to the Uefa Cup third qualifying round for those who survive the two Intertoto rounds. For a club that was on the brink of reaching the lucrative Champions League group stage in 2006, never mind entertaining Thierry Henry and Ronaldinho seven months ago, it is all a bit of a comedown.

However, there is pragmatism behind the decision. Hearts desperately need to inject some value into their campaign and having the target of Intertoto football might just galvanise a squad who had descended into second-last place in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League, where they face the bottom side, Gretna, today before two wins lifted Frail’s men to ninth.

Better clubs than Hearts have entered the Intertoto Cup, notably Juventus, Villarreal and Newcastle United, and it served a purpose for each of them, when their own perennial European presence had been interrupted, just like Hearts.

However, selling the idea of paying to watch Barcelona in the summer is one thing, trying to persuade people to come and see the likes of Cork City, Valur, of Iceland, or Hammarby, of Sweden, is almost mission impossible. Those are the sides who were in the northern section of the Intertoto Cup this season: Scotland and Norway withdrew their representation.

The Premier League has never enjoyed a great relationship with the Intertoto Cup. No side has ever reached the holy grail of “real” European competition. Partick Thistle, Dundee and Hibernian have all entered the tournament but none of them could consider the experiment a football or financial success, drawing only modest crowds.

The first round of the Intertoto Cup this summer will be played on June 21, just 28 days after the Scottish Cup final. The Hearts players would have barely two weeks off before reporting back to preseason training.

“There is a good standard of opposition in this tournament and it is something that we have to look at,” Frail said yesterday.

“There would obviously be a problem of starting training a couple of weeks early but football is a 12-month thing now and there are rarely breaks. When you enter this tournament, it can get you ready for the start of the domestic season.”

You could hardly blame anyone at Tynecastle for wishing to end this domestic season as soon as possible. Languishing in the bottom half of the Premier League, defeated in the semi-finals of the CIS Insurance Cup by Rangers and knocked out of the Scottish Cup by Motherwell, the grim picture is a remarkable contrast to the vision Vladimir Romanov once sketched out of winning the Champions League by 2010.

Hearts were angered yesterday by reports claiming that Romanov is ready to put his entire team on the transfer list. “Mischief making”, a club spokesman said. If the topic was figment of journalistic imagination, the idea was planted by the Hearts owner himself. It was Romanov who told the underachieving squad last season that they would all be sold if they failed to win a home game with Dunfermline Athletic.

Indeed, since that nadir in labour relations, Romanov has sold off the principal assets, such as Craig Gordon and Paul Hartley, and loaned Roman Bednar to West Bromwich Albion. Who, though, in the current squad would have any suitors? Only Andrius Velicka, the top scorer, would draw any interest. Viking Stavanger, of Norway, whose own transfer window does not close until March, are keen on the Lithuanian striker, but the rest of Frail’s team are not even valued by Hearts’ own supporters never mind other clubs.

“I have not read the report,” Frail said. “However, it is absolute rubbish. All I am focusing on is the Gretna game. We will be going for our third league win in a row. That is what people should be writing about.”

Not surprisingly, Frail is keen to distract supporters from the real issue of Hearts’ current plight. A more telling set of numbers could come today when Hearts count the attendance for the game with Gretna. When the newly promoted side went to Tynecastle in August, there was hardly a seat in the house, with a crowd of 16,487. The Hearts supporters have been loyal to their team to the point of blindness, but the sellout days at Tynecastle could be over. The attendance at the recent home win against Kilmarnock was 14,346 and the turnout for the Scottish Cup tie with Motherwell was only 13,651, with 3,000 of that number coming from Lanarkshire.

If that number is down today, then Romanov and Hearts could have a far bigger problem that no amount of spin could resolve.

Taken from timesonline.co.uk