Smith 'always confident' Boyd would convert last-minute penalty and amend striker's seven-year hitch at Gorgie ground

STUART BATHGATE
IT TOOK Kris Boyd two touches and barely two minutes yesterday to rectify a glaring omission in his goalscoring record. He had not scored at Tynecastle for seven years – since his previous team Kilmarnock earned a 1-1 draw, also with ten men, in August 2002 – but made up for that yawning gap with a match-winning penalty just minutes from the end of the game.
With his first touch after coming off the bench to replace Kenny Miller, the striker made the goal himself by knocking the ball on for Steven Naismith to chase. Once referee Craig Thomson ruled that Hearts defender Ismael Bouzid had fouled Naismith in the box, there was always only going to be one taker of the spot-kick.

"Kenny took a bad knock on his arm in the first half and he had to play up there on his own for most of the game," Rangers manager Walter Smith said when asked about what turned out to be an inspired substitution.

"Boyd went on and got the touch through for Naismith, and once you get the penalty you're always confident he'll score. It was a good finish from him, but at the end we had to hold on a little bit."

Although pleased with the 2-1 win, Smith was frustrated by the sluggish fashion in which his team started the match even before the ordering-off of Kevin Thomson had reduced them to ten men. "I don't feel we started the game well regardless of the ordering-off," he said. "We lost a bad goal in the first half, but then in the second we managed to impose ourselves on the game a little bit. We've been slow to start here on a couple of occasions and that was another one. Apart from that I'm obviously delighted to get the three points."

Smith did not protest too vehemently about Thomson's dismissal for a late challenge on Ian Black, but he still offered the suggestion that comparable offences have at times only been punished by a yellow card. "I thought it gave an opportunity to the referee to order him off, but I didn't think there was any great contact with the player. The player carried on playing for the rest of the game.

"A similar challenge had gone on just beforehand, and the referee allowed that one to go with a yellow card. I thought he could have done the same with Kevin Thomson."

Rangers midfielder Lee McCulloch questioned referee Craig Thomson about the decision, and was told what made the difference. "I asked the referee and he said he caught him with his trailing leg so it's a sending-off," McCulloch said.

Smith, meanwhile, has criticised the Scottish Premier League's power brokers following the collapse of the Setanta television deal. Smith believes the SPL's decision last year to snub Sky in favour of the Irish broadcaster accelerated a downward spiral which has led to Scottish football suffering a succession of humiliating results in Europe.

Rangers, Celtic and Aberdeen were the only three clubs to vote against what was a more lucrative four-year £125million deal with Setanta, favouring the bigger exposure and greater security provided by Sky.

Smith said: "The people running our game knocked back Sky – in my opinion one of the best football broadcasters in the world – and took Setanta, a newly-formed company.

"They lost a fortune doing so and they are still all sitting in their positions. How can that be? We cost ourselves a fortune by bad decisions. And at the end of that, we (the clubs] go and suffer."

Setanta's UK operation went out of business this summer and the SPL clubs were forced to accept a vastly reduced deal with Sky and ESPN.

Most top-flight clubs, including Rangers, have therefore been able to spend only a paltry sum on recruiting players this summer.

Motherwell, Falkirk and Aberdeen all crashed out of Europe before the SPL season kicked off and Hearts look certain to follow this week after losing 4-0 in Zagreb on Thursday.

Aberdeen also suffered a particularly chastening results in the Europa League qualifying round (losing 8-1 on aggregate to Czech side Sigma Olomouc), while Celtic are close to going out of the Champions League before the group stages.

Despite pointing the finger at the SPL, Smith believes the Scottish game's problems run deeper than that.

He said: "The problems in Scottish football are not new.

"The higher level of our own domestic player has dried up, and we can't afford to get the higher level of player in, so we are being hit on two fronts at the same time.

"And that situation has brought it around to what we have now, where some seasons we can look all right, and other seasons we don't look so clever. This is one of the years where we haven't started too well."

Smith believes one way to arrest the decline – for the Old Firm at least – is for them to leave the Scottish game altogether. He said: "Rangers and Celtic are ready to play in a big European league.

"Last season, I was criticised when I said that Rangers and Celtic bring in a level of football to Scotland which is higher than we have at the present moment.

"It might save football in Scotland, because if it continues the way it is going just now, we will have a problem. We will have no higher-rated teams at all. That to me is the biggest problem of the lot."

Taken from the Scotsman