Suso Santana must regret swan dive that won Hearts penalty

May 20 2012 By Euan McLean

BLOOD doesn’t show on a maroon jersey, proclaimed the banner. But some stains just can’t be covered up so easily.

Suso Santana might be pleased with himself when he wakes up today with a shiny winner’s medal and a fuzzy head from the celebrations.

But while his Hearts teammates can hold their heads high on the open-top bus today, there should be one nagging regret raining on Santana’s parade.

Let’s be frank, the Jambos fully deserved this win over hapless Hibs whose defending was cheaper than an off-peak day return from Haymarket.

Which makes Santana’s shameful act of cheating even more galling because Hearts wouldn’t have needed it to extend their arch-rivals’ Scottish Cup heartache to 111 years and counting.

But dive he did, and at a key stage of the game at 2-1 when the Hibees still had a chance of making a fist of this Final.

So not only did Santana’s swan dive win a 47th-minute penalty and reduce Hibs to 10 men, it also ruined this historic occasion by turning the second half into a procession.

If he has any decency he’ll watch the replay of his delayed reaction to Pa Kujabi’s naive tug on his shirt, which was outside of the box, and admit he conned ref Craig Thomson.

It was probably the most blatant example of simulation seen at the National Stadium since Salius Mikoliunas, then a Jambo, earned Lithuania a penalty against Scotland back in September 2007.

But unlike Miko, Santana’s play-acting paid off as his side went on to win the game and deliver Hibs a merciless beating that will scar them severely.

Hibs will look back on that moment which killed their comeback hopes and wonder what might have been.

But they should also ask what might have been had they shown the same passion as boss Pat Fenlon who was a frenzied figure on the touchline.

Not enough guys in green turned up while the Jambos rolled over them with even more supremacy than the last time they met in the Cup Final, a 3-1 beating in 1896.

Much has changed since then.

These days Logie Green in Edinburgh is a Tesco car park but 116 years ago it was the scene of the biggest clash in the history of Scotland’s oldest footballing rivalry.

Until yesterday that is.

Back then 17,000 punters paid the princely sum of one shilling to witness the first and only Scottish Cup Final staged outside of Glasgow.

That’s about five pence in today’s money, compared to the 40 quid shelled out by 52,000 supporters yesterday, but at the time that was double the usual ticket price.

Gate receipts totalled £801.14 and the police presence of 259 officers and nine horses was dwarfed by yesterday’s huge security operation spanning the nation’s two biggest cities.

In fact about the only thing that hasn’t changed is the colour of the strips.

Pictures from back in the day show upstanding fellows sporting starched mousers the size of draft excluders and thick cotton shorts stretching well below the knee.

But yesterday – you couldn’t have concealed the fluorescent glow from Leigh Griffiths’ boots if he’d been wearing a burka.

The pre-match show has also clearly come a long way from the Messrs Miller & Richards Works Band that regaled the flat-cap-wearing crowds in the capital’s Powderhall district.

This time? A mass of colour and noise assaulted the senses as fireworks and flames filled the Glasgow skyline.

It’s the kind of razzamataz that could have got you burned at the stake for witchcraft not so long before 1896.

And it truly was a bewitching sight to whet the appetite.

A game of football has never meant more to these fans – and the same clearly went for the players as they set about their task, and each other.

The smell of cordite from the fireworks had barely faded when Ian Black crashed through Griffiths, and how he escaped a booking for it is a mystery that would stump even Edinburgh’s great detective Rebus.

He’d have been busy too because in the 90 minutes that followed, Hibs were murdered.

But Santana’s contribution was criminal too.

Taken from the Daily Record