Tag: Heart of Midlothian

Matters of Hearth & Home in the SPL

Posted by | Oct 17, 2011 | |

There exists evidence to the contrary that a man’s home is his castle. To begin, seeing as how there are so few men living in castles these days, owing to their relatively poor resale value and faulty electrical wiring incapable of  handling the wattage necessary to capture the beautiful game in breathtaking HD, castles just aren’t prime real estate these days. Stripping away the rather antiquated phrase and applying it to football, there is the simple matter that where a club plays its home matches no longer appears the refuge it might once have been. Instead, for those clubs operated more so with an eye to being a business organisation keen on extending their brand or reinvention as a 21st century enterprise, monuments of yesteryear might be seen simultaneously as albatrosses weighing down portfolios, prime real estate worth more to commercial interests than footballing ones, no longer fit for purpose of any kind, too small for modern spectator events, or leveraging instruments during club ownership negotiations. With London clubs such as Tottenham, Chelsea, West Ham United popping up in the news recently regarding where their next moats will be dug around, and with discussions about future castle construction on Merseyside ongoing, stadiums are a hot topic of late, and any or all of these perspectives on their current residences have been submitted. As England is having a sneeze over...

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Match Of The Midweek: Heart of Midlothian 0-5 Tottenham Hotspur

Posted by | Aug 19, 2011 | |

The phrase “European competition” had a somewhat redundant feel to it this evening, after Tottenham Hotpur cruised to a comfortable win against Heart of Midlothian at Tynecastle in a match that felt at times like a training match for the visitors from the Premier League. It was a match that might, under a certain light, have had the feel of a possible surprise on the cards. Hearts, after all, have had three weeks’ worth of competitive football to get themselves into the rhythm of the new season, even accounting for the madness of Vladimir Romanov which led to the sacking of manager Jim Jefferies, while even Spurs’ opening match of the Premier League season against Everton last weekend fell victim to the recent troubles in London. On top of this, Spurs went into the match with a reasonably lengthy injury list and with the sneaking suspicion that this particular tournament might not necessarily be at the top of Harry Redknapp’s list of priorities for this season. Moreover, there is something fundamentally romantic about Hearts. The name Heart of Midlothian has a Shakespearian ring to it and Tynecastle, the club’s home ground, sounds as if it could easily be the home of an laird of the House of Stuart. Tonight’s match, though, was very much a product of the twenty-first century. Matches described in the press as “Battle Of Britain”...

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Madly Honest For a Change

Posted by | Aug 8, 2011 | |

The only managerial soap opera that was to have transpired in Edinburgh this summer was to have been at Easter Road involving the love triangle between Hibernian FC, Colin Calderwood, and Nottingham Forest. Then again, when “Mad Vlad” Romanov blows into town to see about things over at Tynecastle, general upheaval can never be too far out of the reckoning. And so it was, that after watching the Gorgie side fall 0-1 to Dundee United from his seat in the director’s box on the second matchday of the Scottish Premier League season, Romanov made the decision to remove Jim Jefferies from his role as manager and immediately sacked his assistant Billy Brown. An official announcement was delayed until the following day, as on offer to Jefferies was a position as director of football that he subsequently rejected. Following the announcement that Jefferies had well and truly parted company with Hearts, former Sporting Lisbon manager Paulo Sergio Bento Brito was immediately presented as the next manager, overseeing training of his new Scottish squad that very day. This suggests that the dismissal of the 60 yr old Jefferies was more than simply a grossly emotional reaction by Romanov upon witnessing a home loss by Heart of Midlothian but instead a calculated move that had already been in the making. The loss to the Terrors provided Romanov’s action with a touch of immediate credibility once the immediate...

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The Heart of the Rant

Posted by | Jun 28, 2011 | |

Often, when bold remarks from an organization become public, they answer more questions than they raise. When a statement comes across as the one released by Scottish Premier League club Heart of Midlothian over the weekend, including references to blackmail, the mafia, and paedophiles, one must query not only just what exactly that statement is speaking to but also the wisdom of presenting such an announcement as an official club statement. Initially considered to have been posted either on a false website or else a cruel joke on the part of a hacker, time demonstrated that Hearts’ statement blaming sports agents, the SFA, the media, and criminal elements, among others, for their problems was indeed what the club intended to release on its official website for the world to know. Here is the statement in all its bewildering glory, unchanged from its release date of 24/6/11. While many of us continue to digest this and attempt to divine meaning behind it, one question must be considered paramount to the remaining ones. Who’s the staff worker unfortunately charged with having had to put that on the site, after turning to majority owner Vladimir Romanov and asking, “Are you sure you want me to post this?” Because that or some other type of similar scenario surely happened at some point, given the rather odd and rambling statement that was published on Friday...

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