Nightmare for Hearts as Tottenham run riot in Edinburgh

Aug 19 2011 Gavin Berry

THE Edinburgh Festival is in full swing and Hearts fans turned up hoping for vibrant theatre down in Gorgie.

Instead, they watched a Euro horror show.

It was the London side who were the football artists as they took on the role of villains in the capital to effectively kill a much-hyped game inside 12 minutes.

Rafael van der Vaart silenced the audience with the opening strike before Jermain Defoe took centre stage with the second against a home team chasing shadows.

When Jake Livermore added a third before the half-hour mark, home fans were walking out in disgust as Spurs followers chanted: "Can we play you every week?"

Maybe Rangers chairman Craig Whyte should take Harry Redknapp up on his loan offer of Livermore.

Unfortunately, this proved to be the drubbing many outside Scotland had predicted.

And by a side without about £100million worth of their star performers.

It was a sore one to take for Hearts and boss Paulo Sergio.

Last time the Portuguese faced British opposition in Europe it cost him his job and things didn't look much better last night as he watched his team completely outclassed.

As Sporting Lisbon boss, he lost out to Walter Smith's Rangers in this competition back in February and shortly after that he was bulleted.

This time Redknapp - who was involved in an exchange early on with the fourth official who refused to let him sit on the steps next to his dugout - was the veteran Brit boss putting him to the sword.

Sergio knew few people gave his side a chance but he tried to convince us by insisting he'd made a career out of upsetting the big guns in Portugal.

But for much of the night the Jambos gaffer stood inside the dugout, his arms folded, cutting a frustrated figure.

Hearts fans will be asking if their side would have surrendered so easily under former boss Jim Jefferies, the man who got them to this stage and earned such a glamorous tie.

The only time the Jambos faithful had cause to be on their feet was at the half-time interval when Dave Mackay, a legend of both clubs, was introduced to the crowd.

In a short interview, he said he wished he was playing. And how home fans would have loved Mackay in his heyday out there in the maroon of his boyhood heroes.

The Jambos would have settled for keeping alive their hopes for the trip to north London next week, which is why the outcome was such an anti-climax.

This was Hearts' first competitive match against opposition from England and a harsh lesson was learned.

Still, commercially it did prove pretty lucrative for Tynecastle owner Vladimir Romanov.

He might even use some of the cash - TV rights alone brought in £100,000 - towards the tax bill he received from HMRC.

Taken from the Daily Record