A tradition has taken hold, over the years, of Hearts fans marching down the legendary Gorgie Road near their Tynecastle ground, singing about the unpredictability and setbacks that come with supporting the club.
‘Hearts, Hearts are falling apart again,’ they proclaim, to tune of the Joy Division song Love Will Tear Us Apart, just like supporters of Leeds United, another fanbase who’ve lived with the vagaries of fortune.
A new song was being belted out into the Edinburgh sky on Wednesday evening, as the approaching Gorgie Ultras let off flares and held banners adorned with images of captain Lawrence Shankland and manager Derek McInnes. ‘Is this way to Barcelona?’ it runs, to the tune of Tony Christie’s Amarillo. ‘Bayern Munich, Lazio, Roma! The Gorgie Boys are taking over. The Champions League awaits for me.’
It’s safe to say that no fanbase in next season’s elite continental tournament is relishing the prospect quite like this maroon army and their team’s presence is justified, considering Hearts have been top of the league all season.
But the real, burning desire – for a Scottish Premiership title, which they can secure with a draw at Celtic on Saturday lunchtime – is the one that nobody seems to be singing about, as they gather in the Tynecastle Arms and Athletics Arms pubs some four hours before the evening’s Falkirk home match.
That’s because the title has eluded them – haunted them – for so very many years. In 1965, they needed to avoid a two-goal defeat on the last day of the season to clinch it, and lost 2-0 to Kilmarnock, who won it instead on goal average.
Hearts go into Saturday’s title showdown with Celtic knowing a draw would seal their first Scottish title since 1960
Supporters of the club have been burned by near-misses in Hearts’ history, but many on the ground in Edinburgh are still optimistic going into the final day
In 1986, they needed a draw against Dundee and lost 2-0 again, handing it to Celtic on goal difference. ‘Falling apart again.’ In no quest have those words seemed more appropriate than Hearts and the Premiership.
The Gorgie Boys’ banner of McInnes carries the words ‘In Del We Trust’ and he has made it his mission to help supporters to exorcise this ghost. The message chalked on to the board outside the Athletic Arms on Wednesday afternoon declares ‘Believe’ – the McInnes mantra all season – though the anxiety within that pub, formerly known as The Gravediggers because of the burial ground across the road, makes some look almost ill.
‘Don’t mention it,’ says Davie Fisher, one of the regulars, when 1986 comes up. ‘I remember the faces in the bus queues on Gorgie Road afterwards. People with tears in their eyes. Sad for weeks afterwards.’
The distinguished Scottish sports broadcaster Archie Macpherson covered both the 1965 and 1986 games and it’s the aftermath of the first which sticks with him most. ‘I was commentating in the old shed at Tynecastle, now long gone,’ he says. ‘I just remember the utter silence at the end. The desolation.’
Everyone of a maroon disposition recites some caprice of fate which, they’ll tell you, did for Hearts in the ’86 match against Dundee. The Edinburgh referee, recruited last minute after the appointed official cried off sick, who didn’t award Hearts a nailed-on penalty because he didn’t want to be ‘the biased ref who gifted Hearts the title’. The flu virus which led Hearts to ask, without success, to have the game postponed.
And now, we wait to see if the club will be condemned by their latest act of outrageous fortune – the highly contentious VAR intervention which gave Celtic a 99th-minute win at Motherwell on Wednesday and dragged Hearts back from the brink of a first Scottish title by a non-Old Firm side since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in 1985.
For 24 minutes on Wednesday, as Celtic trailed, Hearts were ‘champions’. Now Celtic are odds-ons favourite to win the decider and take the title on home soil.
‘I think they’re haunted. I fear that penalty was the winning of the title,’ says Macpherson, who like many across Scotland feels the spot-kick, awarded for a supposed handball by Motherwell’s Sam Nicholson when jumping for a header, should never have been awarded. ‘That one-point advantage Hearts now have looks very, very slim. This could be the most significant penalty decision ever made in our championship.’
Manager Derek McInnes (centre) has tried to help the club exorcise their title demons, telling its supporters to ‘believe’
Celtic were given a lifeline deep into stoppage time against Motherwell in midweek, when Sam Nicholson conceded a controversial penalty for this handball
The morning after the controversy – which left McInnes reflecting in an impressive and dignified press conference that it seemed like ‘us against everybody else’ given a VAR review’s refusal of a penalty for Hearts at Motherwell’s ground four days earlier – Edinburgh’s Hibs-supporting fraternity was delighted. ‘Yes!’ says Scott, a taxi-driver. ‘Everyone wants the Old Firm stranglehold broken but we don’t want it done by our Ugly Sister!’
But in the Heart of Midlothian Museum, which charts the club’s 152-year history of highs and lows, they’re not so sure the die is cast against them this time. ‘I think there’ll be another twist,’ says Cathie, whose late husband was at Tynecastle to see the club’s last title clinched, 66 years ago. ‘The referee on Saturday won’t want to make a big decision against us after this. It could still work in our favour.’
The apparently injustice has also awoken many across Scotland to the Hearts miracle – the story of a club going toe-to-toe with Old Firm clubs who command five to six times more annual revenue than them – in a way they hadn’t before this week.
Though a Tynecastle title would defy football economics even more than Leicester City’s Premier League title a decade back, the Scottish nation has not been in love with this fairytale in quite the way you might expect and not as much as they would if Edinburgh rivals Hibernian were in this position.
It’s hard to identify why. Hibs have the whole Proclaimers and Irvine Welsh legend behind them: the references in Trainspotting and the footage of their fans singing Sunshine on Leith when they won the Scottish Cup final against Rangers at Hampden, 10 years back.
For some, there would be schadenfreude if Hearts blew it again. ‘We’re a smaller country and as a consequence we are very tied into our own football communities and n’er the twain shall meet in a sporting sense,’ Macpherson observes.
But the beautiful little club museum reveals Hearts to be a club with a serious, 152-year-old history of indefatigability. Its story is of a side who took their name from the local dancing club whose members formed it and which played at more than 20 sites across the capital before making a home at Tynecastle.
A club from which 16 players and many fans signed up to the famous ‘Sporting Battalion’ raised by Sir George McCrae in World War One. Seven players lost their lives. A club which Lithuanian-Russian Vladimir Romanov had taken to near liquidation, just 14 years back, until fans formed the Foundation of Hearts which was lifesaving.
Hearts recruited brilliantly in the transfer market last year, with Claudio Braga, who arrived from Norwegian club Aalesunds for £450,000, Scotland’s player of the year by a distance
Tony Bloom has transformed Hearts’ fortunes since investing £9.86million into the club and providing access to his Jamestown Analytics recruitment model
‘The odds have always been against us, but we’ve always come through,’ says John, at the museum, from where a group of German tourists is being shown out towards the pitch.
A year ago, it was finally Hearts’ turn to fall on some luck when Tony Bloom, Brighton and Hove Albion’s owner, invested £9.86million for a 30 per cent shareholding and access to his Jamestown Analytics recruitment model which he insisted would shatter the Old Firm dominance within a decade.
He’s well ahead of schedule, after recruitment from untapped places – ‘Jamestown signings’ as everyone is calling them in the Gorgie pubs – which took Hearts top and kept them there, while Celtic and Rangers’ seasons were exploding after the catastrophic recruitment of Wilfried Nancy and Russell Martin as managers.
Claudio Braga who arrived from Norwegian club Aalesunds for £450,000, is Scotland’s player of the year by a distance and has inspired the Tynecastle ‘Radio Braga’ anthem which has been a soundtrack of this season (they love a song at Tynecastle). Alexandros Kyziridis, recruited from the obscurity of Slovak side Zemplin Michalovce, has flourished, too.
Most of Scottish football outside Tynecastle was extremely sceptical when Bloom arrived – how dare he think he could crack Scottish football and dismantle the Old Firm just like that? – yet even Hibs fans admit he’s proved everyone wrong. ‘There are rumours he looked at investing in us first,’ says Scott, the taxi driver. ‘If only.’
But the Bloom effect would certainly not have been so immediate without McInnes, the real jewel in this Hearts crown, who has quietly and impressively knitted the signings together and imbued the faithful with the belief they were struggling for.
The Hearts board kept things simple, avoiding the Glasgow clubs’ penchant for exotic managerial recruits and opting for the 54-year-old, who has something of the old school about him and knows the Premiership inside out.
Alexandros Kyziridis, recruited from the obscurity of Slovak side Zemplin Michalovce, has flourished
But the Bloom effect would not have been so immediate without McInnes, the real jewel in this Hearts crown
He has structured the team around two good wide men (often Braga and Kyziridis) and a good striker (Shankland is the best in Scotland) and put his faith in more regular Scottish starters than the Old Firm – many of them bought from other Scottish clubs. It’s perhaps symptomatic of an entrenched Old Firm bias that Shankland might be the only member of this squad to feature in Steve Clarke’s World Cup.
Rangers missed out on their own chance to hire McInnes – which was a big mistake. Rangers fans were this week hanging banners to a Glasgow thoroughfare demanding that their latest manager, German Danny Rohl – ‘Danny Toilet Roll’ as some are calling him – be dismissed.
The treatment of long-serving full back James Tavernier, who had all his family at Ibrox on Wednesday having been primed for a memorable send-off against Hibs, only to be told by Rohl that he wouldn’t start, was poor. Tavernier’s career at a club he has served so well ended in bitterness. Rangers lost 2-1.
McInnes, by contrast, has got the personal touches right. One small stroke of genius has been asking singer Colin Chisholm, who sang the recorded 1986 version of Tynecastle’s iconic The Hearts Song to lead the stadium in song before home games, these past months.
No one, least of all Chisholm, knew that his renditions of ‘this is my story, this is my song, follow your Hearts and you can’t go wrong’ would ignite the old stadium in quite the way it has.
A social media clip of Chisholm receiving a call from McInnes, thanking him for his contribution, went viral this week. He helped send the roof off the place before the 3-0 win over Falkirk.
‘Twirl your scarf, sing your hearts out, get right behind our lads,’ McInnes asked Hearts fans – ‘Jambos’ as they have become known after Hearts became the ‘Jam Tarts’ – in his programme notes on Wednesday.
Singer Colin Chisholm, who sang the recorded 1986 version of Tynecastle’s iconic The Hearts Song, has helped ramp up the atmosphere at the stadium in the past few months
Supporters seem to feel that McInnes is their manager, too. ‘Derek’s got everyone behind the team,’ says John, at the museum. ‘’He’s put a strong mentality into the players and into us.’
On Friday, McInnes said the story could be different this time. ‘There might be people out there who think everything’s back on script – “Celtic win their home game, they win the league”,’ he said. ‘But we’ve ripped the script up so often this season. We’ve got one more in us I think.’
For years, a list on the wall at the museum, entitled ‘Nearly’, has detailed the missed chances of glory, though it was recently removed as part of a reorganisation. Neither do the title conclusions of 1965 and 1986 seem to feature on the videos which are on continuous loop there. People sense the march of a different kind of history.
‘Coming from the capital city, it’s appropriate for Hearts to be a club who challenge for the title consistently and our football would benefit so much from that,’ says Macpherson.
The Jambos would certainly raise a glass to that sentiment, as they join a crowd of 60,000 fans at Parkhead on Saturday. They’ll be carrying all that McInnes has taught them into that place: ‘Believe.’
