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| Tuesday, 25 October 2011 06:37 |
“Yes, I think the results are just starting to come in…”Hearts 0-2 Rangers – no Old Firm double for Sergio  Hearts’ boss Paulo Sergio hosted the other half of Scotland’s ‘Old Firm’ inside of a fortnight when facing runaway SPL leaders Rangers at Tynecastle on Sunday past. The Portuguese’s maroon platoon made short shrift of an anaemic Celtic side two weeks previously, a performance from the visitors so incoherent that little could be gained in terms of evidence as to where Sergio’s men find themselves in the Scottish Football Firmament.Now, I feel, we have something approaching an answer.
There was a lot of talk (from the press, and not really anyone else) before the game that Sergio’s failure to get past Rangers in last season’s Europa League when boss of Sporting cost Sergio his job at Alvalade. Not so, said Sergio, citing instead a real ‘lack of support’ in Lisbon. The spurious sacking proposition was a throwaway line spun by a Scottish press looking for an angle where none really existed, but this is what journalists do.
Wrong approachOn to more pressing matters and Hearts came haring out of the traps in a bid to unsettle their visitors. This, I believe, was Sergio’s first mistake. Whether Rangers are good, bad, indifferent or just bloody awful (and they’ve been all of the above in the 25 years since they forced their collective way into my unwilling consciousness) this is not a side that ever gets physically intimidated. The maxim of ‘setting about them’ doesn’t really pay dividends. The way to beat Rangers – as has been shown by European teams of most meagre resources (the names of Unirea Urziceni, Grasshopper Zurich, NK Maribor are but three in a pantheon of dozens) – is to ‘out-football’ them.
The tactic of ‘getting in the faces’ of the opposition paid dividends for the likes of Wimbledon and even John Beck’s Cambridge United in the 1980s but the game has moved on by some distance since those heady/dirty days, and this is evidenced by yellow and red cards for infractions that would not previously have distracted the referee from checking if the pea in his whistle was giving a pleasing ‘pheep!’ noise when lips were pursed to the device, and blown.
Rangers are not a particularly gifted side, but, in the SPL, they are very hard to beat; impossible to beat, in fact, so far this term. Hearts’ early work was all pressing, keeping possession and thundering into challenges when the ball deserted them. The results of this tactic were shown early on when Rangers hit on the break with menace a couple of times in the opening quarter of an hour.
Sergio’s remit was to bring a more ‘European style’ of football to Tynecastle and he had done so to an extent in previous games. Here, it all went out the window, and Rangers’ physicality, allied to their having better players, was to be Hearts’ undoing when the pacy visiting right back, Steven Whittaker picked up a loose ball well inside the Rangers half and attacked the Hearts rearguard before laying off – somewhat fortuitously – to Steven Naismith, who opened the scoring for the visitors.
Denied by woodwork |
I have only one thing to ask. I live in Scotland, can we swap weather with Portugal? Do let me know when you've got a moment. I can pay, of course, but only stretch to about 47 euro.
I wish I had saved it.
He basically said how he and the squad/team got no support from anybody for 4 months due to the elections.
I never thought he was right for Sporting, but I doubt anyone was last season.