Rudi Skacel sickens Saints

Skacel's efforts brought Hearts a first win in four games and also made for an eighth game in which St Mirren have conceded game-changing goals in the final minutes. Their emotions in games must be like those experienced watching reruns of Bambi. You know it is going to end horribly and, however much you will it to be different, a poor defenceless creature is always is taken down at the close. Skacel supplied the fatal shot when failure to clear a corner allowed him to poke the ball through a ruck of players.

The Paisley club's manager Danny Lennon took the wounding badly. "This is probably the worst I have felt. My stomach's still going," he said, no doubt hurting because his side had Hearts on toast in the first period, then showed great spirit to claim the lead a second time after the home side had seemed to gain the momentum with an equaliser early in the second period.

"Once again, it's deja vu," he said. "I was saying 'come on, this is the day you're going to have the mentality to see it through. Tell me how a team can defend admirably for 87 minutes then go to pieces?"

The answer is because it has become a habit. An extension of that habit is failing to capitalise on dominance. "How we were only 1-0 down at half time, I didn't know," said Hearts manager Jim Jefferies, who revealed he and assistant Billy Brown "lost it" over their no-show in the first half. There had been only one mystery about that half: How the Gorgie club weren't under threat of suffering an absolute bleaching by the end of it? Lennon must have been kept away from sharp objects after his side produced some incisive, intelligent football but contrived to miss a hatful of chances.

Michael Higdon might have scored twice - producing a ripper from nowhere for his 69th-minute second when he received the ball with back to goal, spun and launched a bazooka effort from 25 yards - but he could have single-handedly wrapped up three points inside quarter of an hour. His personal chancefest started a couple of minutes in when he could only nudge a free header towards goal and so allow Marian Kello to block.

Then he was guilty of a terrible miss when, needing a simple side-foot to put it away, he instead kicked the ball from one foot on to the other, resulting it it bobbling along the goalmouth.

It was a surprise when his luck changed in the 14th minute, but even then it was only by slenderest of margins. A Mark McLean free-kick from the right channel was hung up at the back post, from where Darren McGregor was able to stop it going behind and head it back to Higdon. He looped it towards goal and it crossed the line before Craig Thomson could boot it away.

Jefferies pointed to the "big difference" between his side's first and second period as being down to his three substitutions. Andrew Driver and Scott Robinson appeared for the ineffectual David Obua and Adrian Mrowiec following the break before subsequent scorer Ryan Stevenson replaced the limping David Templeton in 64 minutes.

By then, the scores were level after Skacel cut in from the right and whacked a low drive beyond Paul Gallacher from the edge of the box.

The St Mirren response was wholly unexpected, but not what then followed in the final ten minutes. A high ball into the box found the visiting defence exhibiting a panic and that allowed Stephen Elliott to chest the ball into the path of Stevenson to prod in. St Mirren attempted to shore up their defence by bringing on John Potter as the clocked turned towards 90 but all that did was allow the captain to be at the scene of a crime he has witnessed first-hand countless times in recent seasons.

"As bad as we were in the first half, afterwards I had to sit them down and praise them for a great reaction," Jefferies said, his third-place side retaining their 12-point advantage over the chasing Dundee United. "We went behind to St Mirren's only shot in the second half and I thought: 'Here we go, the surge is oing to count for nothing'. But we know St Mirren's track record at losing late goals. You could sense when we got the corner in the last minutes there luck was going to desert them again."

Taken from the Scotsman