STYLE without substance is uniquely useless and incredibly frustrating. There are clubs whose fans are happy with pretty football that gives no guarantee of an end result, but Hearts are definitively not that club.
For 80 minutes yesterday, the G
orgie side were once again in serious danger of dominating Inverness, of playing all the football, of weaving all the pretty patterns and showing all the endeavour, but of coming up short thanks to a chronic inability to convert pressure and territory into goals.
Twice this season Hearts have had the Highlanders under the cosh only to be undone by their profligacy in front of goal. To the noisy frustration of the Hearts fans, yesterday looked like groundhog day until 18-year-old Gary Glen's deft one-two with Ruben Palazuelos ten minutes from time was followed by the most emphatic of finishes from the teenager to settle a match that should have been well beyond Craig Brewster's men long before.
With Saulius Mikoliunas and Deividas Cesnauskis showing verve and invention in their approach work, Hearts fashioned a welter of chances and sometimes it seemed as if it would have been easier to have scored from the positions they created than to have conjured the spectacular misses. Cesnauskis set the tone when he shot against Caley Thistle keeper Michael Fraser from point-blank range after Glen had skinned Richard Hastings for pace down the left wing and stroked across a teasing cross. Goodness knows how the ball didn't end up in the net.
Glen himself had blasted over the bar moments earlier after Jason Thomson had run from the halfway line to make the overlap before driving the ball across the penalty area for the young Hearts striker. Central defender Christos Karipidis added his own dose of waywardness in front of goal too: his first header over the bar from a Cesnauskis corner was hardly a capital crime, but when he rose unopposed moments later from another corner to crack the ball off the crossbar, the home side had missed another gilt-edged opportunity. There were even signs that Hearts could have cause to rue their inability to break the deadlock when Steven Banks was called into action three times in the dying minutes of the first half. Don Cowie's rasping free-kick was a straightforward enough save, but Banks had to move with a good deal more urgency to keep Doug Imrie's header and Dennis Wyness's low shot ending up in his net.
Hearts started the second half the way they had begun the first, with a toxic mix of shot-shy strikers and dire execution. Substitute Lee Wallace was the most obvious offender, first having a shot smothered from close range and then, his nerve clearly shot after that miss, passing aimlessly into traffic when he was through on his own with only Fraser to beat. Spasms of frustration rippled through the stand behind the Inverness goal at that decision.
There was at least one thing to ease the end of season ennui. He may have only got one touch after coming on in 90 minutes, but at 16 years, one month and 14 days, Scott Robinson yesterday became the youngest Hearts player to grace the SPL.
The full article contains 555 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
