Kilmarnock 1 Hearts 1: Goals and red cards are shared . . . but no handshake

Golf Correspondent

Monday 13 February 2012

Shake Gate, Fake Shake.

Paulo Sergio refused to shake hands with Kenny Shiels on Saturday after the Kilmarnock manager had commented on Hearts earlier in the week. Picture: SNS

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Nick Rodger

Call it what you like, it was some weekend for the handshake. Or the lack of it. Even the Match of the Day posse raked over the well- documented Suarez-Evra affair in bewildering detail on Saturday night with slow motion replays and analysis. Never before has the practise caused such a stooshie.

Here in Scotland, the bickering between Kenny Shiels, the Kilmarnock manager, and Paulo Sergio, his Hearts counterpart, reached its inevitable conclusion at Rugby Park just before 3pm. Sergio's rebuff of Shiels' outstretched hand prior to kick-off was as predictable as Scottish football itself. While most of the players insisted the haverings of the two managers had little impact on them, there was no doubt that the verbal volleys that had been battered back and forth in the build up to Saturday's encounter set the tone for a match that was as ugly as Quasimodo with a bad cold.As soon as Dieter Van Tornhout, Kilmarnock's Belgian striker, went hurtling into Jamie Hamill in the opening minute the stage was set for an ill-tempered contest. Both Van Tornhout and Hamill would be sent off as tempers flared in a match that exploded into life during the final 10 minutes.Having gone a man down after 54 minutes, Kilmarnock were still the better side despite their numerical disadvantage. When Paul Heffernan put them ahead, and Hearts were reduced to 10-men just moments later, it looked like that would be that. Yet, Hearts had the final word in injury-time when Suso Santana nipped in at the back post to head in Stephen Elliott's deep cross and plunder a point. Cue a lot of jostling and goading at the final whistle as grown men indulged in unnecessary, petty squabbling.Santana appeared to have a pop at Shiels, an action Michael Nelson, the Kilmarnock defender, took exception to. "I was just walking off the pitch at the end and I was going to shake Sergio's hand if he came up to me; his argument with my manager is nothing to do with me," said Nelson, an English League One title winner with Paul Lambert's Norwich City two years ago. "But then the boy Suso decided to go up in our manager's face and have a go at him, which I thought was out of order because it's nothing to do with him. So I told Suso what I thought of him. Whatever's gone on is between the managers. Our manager has had something to say and so has theirs. It's all handbags really."Judging by Saturday's events, the handbags will be out for some time yet. Shiels is a colourful, outspoken character who sticks by his forthright opinions. Sergio will not be for budging either, and has clearly been wounded by the Northern Irishman's suggestion that he should have resigned out of principle having been forced by Hearts owner, Vladimir Romanov, to drop Marian Kello after the goalkeeper turned down a move to Austria Vienna."Sergio could have defused the situation by just accepting the handshake or the managers could have had a quiet word before the game and said they weren't going to shake hands and stayed apart," added the diplomatic Nelson, who played his part in the Kilmarnock opener when his header was blocked by Jamie MacDonald, the Hearts goalkeeper, and Heffernan picked up the pieces.Amid the general chaos of the weekend, there was some good news to report when Kilmarnock officials revealed that the club had managed to turn a £1.6m trading loss during 2010 into a £200,000 profit last season. At least that's something positive to talk about.

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Kilmarnock 1 Hearts 1: Goals and red cards are shared . . . but no handshake

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