TEN games unbeaten. Seven games without conceding a goal. A player who cost £8.5m just two years ago in Steven Naismith arriving at Tynecastle on loan.
A shiny new stand in place. Blowing away Celtic’s long unbeaten run. Oh and knocking your fiercest rivals from across the city out of the Scottish Cup, ending a nine-game Derby hoodoo for good measure. It really is a good time to be a Hearts fan.
The signing of Naismith will prove to be a massive coup for the club. How they have managed to get an international-class player on a reputed £50,000 a week up the road to Hearts is a credit to Ann Budge and the whole board at the club.
They have taken a bit of stick for the debacle of the new main stand but on the park to have current international players like Christophe Berra, Aaron Hughes, Kyle Lafferty and the aforementioned Naismith in the squad on their budget has been wonderful recruitment. It now looks a great mixture of experience and youth in the Hearts squad going forward.
Craig Levein has yet to taste defeat at Tynecastle since taking over from Ian Cathro. It has been an amazing turnaround at Hearts since the dark days of the Cathro experiment which turned into an unmitigated disaster. Levein, of course, must take responsibility for getting that appointment so badly wrong and placed himself under huge pressure when he took over the reigns last August. He was there to be shot at.
I must admit I was heavily critical of the set up with Cathro as head coach and Levein as the director of football. Rumours of Craig signing players, doing team talks and the very public passing of notes down to his coach all smacked of undermining rookie. All that would have sent out serious alarm signals among the players as to who was actually in charge. As it turned out Cathro was completely out of his depth and I said at the time that Levein would have been better off just doing the job himself.
I felt that with Craig being so close again to the coalface of club football it had reignited a bit of fire in his belly to get back. It has proven to be a masterstroke by Budge to give him that opportunity to redeem himself for his poor appointment.
I had the misfortune to play against a really strong Hearts side in the early 2000s with Hibs. We had more talent in our team and better individual footballers on the whole but Levein always found a way to either turn us over or snatch a draw from defeat.
I always thought of him as a really good manager back then as his teams were well coached and disciplined. It always struck me how difficult they were to break down defensively and how organised they were particularly at the back. Then I heard of the constant work in terms of shape that Craig did in training to drill his back four and it made sense.
For Pressley and Webster back then see Berra and Souttar now. He had an experienced international defender playing and mentoring a young prospect beside him. They always started from a solid base and were hard to beat and then played from there. The run of clean sheets Hearts have put together has came as no surprise to me. Yes it will never be easy on the eye watching any Craig Levein team but it is very effective and gets results which as a manager you live and die by.
What I also must give Craig credit for is his faith in youth. The obvious one has been Harry Cochrane who Levein was brave enough to throw in against Celtic at the age of 16. But he has also given game playing time to the likes of Anthony MacDonald who is also 16 and Lewis Moore at 19. He blooded these guys at a time when Hearts were struggling to win games and he was under a little bit of pressure himself from the punters. It was a bold move which has paid of handsomely. These guys have added a zip and exuberance to a largely experienced team which has given them a better balance overall.
Right now Craig Levein has Hearts beating loudly again. They will continue to be a devilishly tough nut to crack as the last seven games have shown. If Naismith can hit the ground running in terms of goals and the defence continue to be the Scrooge of the Premiership then the sky can be the limit for the revitalised Jam Tarts.
AND ANOTHER THING
The absence of Anthony Stokes over the weekend appears to have signalled the end of his Hibs career.
In Neil Lennon, he has a man who has been like a father figure to him firstly at Celtic and now at Hibs.
He has given him chance after chance but enough is enough.
Stokes has let his manager and teammates down badly with his behaviour off the park and it seems now that not only has his manager’s patience snapped but so has the majority of the Hibs punters too.
He will always be remembered as a Hibs legend after his goals in that Cup Final but unfortunately he will also unfortunately be remembered as player who has wasted his career.
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