Those ole Hearts of Tyne, been broke but not this time (Jambos … 1 GERS …1)

Oh, I don’t know about this one. I just don’t know.

Strange, strange, strange. It was snowing last Sunday, there was hardly a breath in the air today: Hearts did a huddle, Rangers wore all blue. Both goalies wore blue, we didn’t get all of the School end and while the applause rang out for Jimmy Jonstone, this was precisely the kind of football the recently passed legend was NOT about.

A horrible game. A war of attrition in which we often didn’t seem to know whether to stick or twist. We’ve come away with a point which, on the day, often looked like the best we could ever hope for. But we’ve come away with a point which, when we look at the season as a whole and our minimum domestic requirement there from, could yet turn mediocrity into disaster.

A few Bears, at my place of work, last week, spoke of a draw being a decent result today. Obviously they’d all have preferred a win but me? For what it’s worth I think we NEEDED the win. It would have maintained two converging senses of momentum, both conducive to Rangers playing in next season’s Champions League: Hearts had a bad result at Inverness last week, we had a great result at home to Killie: The Jambos suddeny couldn’t score and we suddenly couldn’t stop ourselves. An eight point gap betweeen us in third and Hearts in second had become six. We had no more European games to drain our domestic legs but we’d done enough on the continent to have our heads held high. Alex McLeish was on his way out - officially - and then Paul Le Guen was officially on his way in: Hearts were making announcements to reassure everyone Graham Rix was actually picking the team and then confirming on Friday that he would more or less be out of a job for not winning the treble with a team picked by the club owner.

Everything, it seemed, was pointing to Rangers going up and Hearts going down: A win today, against the Jambolinos on their own patch, would have kicked away the last, crooked leg holding up the shaky Hearts bid to split the Old Firm. (normally, I’d be more than happy to be split as widely as possible from the “other half” - one day they WILL be relegated, wont they??!!)

Hearts at home are good this season. The Hearts of today are far superior to the Hearts of any time in the last 19 years but the Hearts of today are still vastly inferior to the Villarreal of today. If we can go to El Madrigal and draw 1-1 then Tynecastle demands a win. Especially when that win is so vital towards our club’s plans for next season and beyond. Pee-pee Le Guen needs to feed on Champions League points.

In that respect, a draw at the Maroon-dome, was neither worthy of us or enough for us.

The traditional European hangover took a positive hue against Killie - we couldn’t help playing them off the pitch last week after our game had been taken to a new level at El Madrigal just a few days before. But a week of re-acclimatising to the fact we only have second place in the SPL to aim for would prove a few things about the players to the fans:

Wouldn’t it?

Today we weren’t good enough to be feted as The Real Rangers Thing returned. But we showed just enough character and skill to - frustratingly - keep that jury hung:

The game commenced, immediately we had a great counter-attack. It looked like Eck McLeish had got it right - dropping Boyd in favour of Lovenkrands was a good move: The top scorer in the SPL was too slow and unsubtle outside the box. The top Rangers scorer in the Champions League was just the man to play through the middle as we tried to use pace, and skill to unravel the maroon back-line.

The game commenced for more than a minute and we looked out of sorts. Hearts were more comfortable with the stop-start, bitty, petualnt, sniping nature of the game and I was disappointed that The Gers seemed unable to cope with this - it’s a basic requirment of yer average SPL footballer: When the going get’s bogged down, the tough get boggin. Lovenkrands couldn’t get a touch. At least Boyd would have known where to position himself in the box for the one or two meagre balls we actually got in there. Hemdani was posted missing, Barry was struggling and Hearts seemed to have twice as many players on the pitch as us - every time we took a touch they eased us off the ball, with three men on one. When we muscled back they hit the deck: Only Soti knows how to do this for us.

A great bit of skill and muscle on the wing from one of the Hearts foreign legion ripped us open: Hartley made an easy run and squared for Bednar, Jankauskas, whoever the hell it was, to finish easily - unmarked. All we managed was a Burke flash across the front of the goal to which Buffel, amazingly, couldn’t slide in and slot home at the back post.

Amazingly - this is exactly the goal we scored in the second half. Big Dado and wee Burkey - our two contenders for Man of The Match and both booked and warned to the point of dismissal - combined to set up the same scenario. The wee man hammered it across the six yard box so clinically that the amazing Craig Gordon was helpless to cut it out: Buffel did what he should have done in the first half by sliding in to bundle it off Gordon and into the net.

Hearts seemed ready to unock us more often than we them. But, in truth, it never really happened. Neilson hit the the bar with a long-range dipper and Gordon pulled off a fantastic point blank save from Buffel minutes before the Belgian actually scored. In truth, Neilson’s shot hit the top of the bar and Buffel’s half-volley from eight yards was wastefully teed up at waist height in the middle of the goals for the Scotland Number One. Like Chrissey’s close-range angled shot which went wide of the near post with ten minutes left, Buffel should have done better.

Boyd had come on early in the second for Lovenpants, after Pete hit one free-kick too many over the bar, but it was Prso and Burke’s determination and Bufel’s ever-present threat which earned us a point other clubs would have been proud of but which this club might yet rue. We’ll get them in the wide-open spaces of Ibrox, the Jambos - in what could yet be a historic showdown and will definitely be the only post-spilt fixture of any note in the top half of the SPL - and we’ve also got the sickening situation of hoping celtic beat Hearts a couple of times in the next two months. Oh, we could have made life so much easier for ourselves today - if we’d decided to twist, twist, twist. Or maybe if we’d just had a better team…

Note to Paul le Guen: We need a right bastard on the pitch. Rangers need at least one out-and-out swine - who knows how to look after himself and hurt the opposition and how to do it subtly. We need more steel for next season and this season we need to steal second place.