PAIN WAS NOT an exclusive feeling at Murrayfield late on Wednesday night. Everyone connected with Heart of Midlothian was hurting. A few youngsters hung around hoping to get autographs, but those old enough had sought out the pub in a bid to dull the effects of the trauma that had been suffered. The empty stadium was left to a few staff in the club’s merchandise caravans as they packed replica shirts away. All of them wondered if the Champions League dream has now been put to bed.
Yet no one could even begin to match the emotion kept in check by the slender man who slipped away into the night. It is on his shoulders that Hearts’ hopes of rescuing something from the wreckage of those ambitions by AEK Athens will now firmly rest.
Not Steven Pressley, nor Roman Bednar, or even Craig Gordon. No, it is Paul Hartley that Valdas Ivanauskas will now turn to in the side’s hour of need. The Scotland playmaker has not kicked a ball this season because of a groin injury but as he left Murrayfield after AEK inflicted a cruel 2-1 defeat upon his colleagues in the first leg of the third qualifying round tie, Hartley was vowing to journalists that he would be back for the return in Athens on August 23.
On the Hearts website, Hartley takes centre stage just as he does on the pitch. A picture of him kissing his winner’s medal after last season’s Tennent’s Scottish Cup final triumph over Gretna is emblazoned with the slogan: the heart and soul of Edinburgh. It refers to the club but it should really mean Hartley.
No man gave more to Hearts’ cause last season to ensure they finished second in the Bank of Scotland Premierleague. The midfield player’s
16 goals — including the penalty against Aberdeen that delivered Champions League football — ought to have given him the biggest stage in club football to demonstrate his talent. Yet, instead, he has been sitting in the Murrayfield stands. He helped BBC Radio with their commentary for the previous round against NK Siroki Brijeg, but last night he simply had to watch in disbelief with the rest of the 32,000 Hearts fans as success turned into a nightmare with AEK’s two late goals.
Hearts have missed Hartley’s hunger and drive. It did not show in that rousing defeat of Celtic last Sunday, but it was evident against AEK. No one made the lung-bursting runs that Hartley contributes and no one closed down either of the Greek’s side two sources of creativity, the Brazilian pair of Julio Cesar and Emerson. These things do not happen when Hartley is around.
So, Ivanauskas will almost certainly take a gamble on the 28-year-old midfield player in 12 days’ time in the Olympic Stadium. Hearts will need a personal best to win this tie now. The potential prize of £6 million for reaching the group stages is going to be replaced by a parachute into the Uefa Cup unless Ivanauskas’s side can win by two goals.
The fact that Hartley’s replacement, Bruno Aguiar, is out of the second leg after being sent off for two cautions on Wednesday night, merely heightens the need to push the Scotland player back into action.
The Hearts players recognised that AEK gave them a football lesson before and after Saulius Mikoliunas’s 61st-minute goal put the Tynecastle side in front. However, even though Pressley’s wellorganised defence played heroically, tiredness caught up with the ten men when it mattered most. Two minutes from the end, Pantelis Kapetanos headed a cross by substitute Stavros Tziortziopoulos past Gordon for a merited equaliser. However, cruelty then took over in injury time when Christophe Berra deflected a shot from Nikolaos Lyberopoulos past the stranded goalkeeper.
“For 88 minutes we thought we had got a great result that would have given us something to defend over in Greece,” Gordon said. “However, we got caught with a couple of late goals which was disappointing. I don’t think it was case of us not playing well, I just think AEK were by far the better team throughout the game but we stuck to our game plan and restricted them to long shots.
“They are a good side and it’s difficult to play against teams of that quality but if we want to get to the group stages then we have to beat teams like that.
“We can play a lot better than that — although it remains to be seen whether teams are going to let us play better — but we will go to Greece and give it our best shot and try to keep a clean sheet.
“If we can stick a couple of chances away then you never know. It can be done. It’s going to be difficult but we are still hopeful that we can do it.
We’re not out of the tie but it would have been better to go there with a better scoreline.”
It was in midfield that Hearts were at their weakest. Ivanauskas made a mistake in giving a debut to Christos Karipidis, the new signing from PAOK Salonika, playing the Greek defender out of position, which the Hearts head coach recognised when he replaced him with Edgaras Jankauskas.
Aguiar’s dismissal was harsh. He barely kicked the ball away — his crime for the second yellow card — but the Portuguese player insists he would not have earned a red card if Nicolai Vollquartz, the Danish referee, had not made an immediate decision. “The referee did not realise he had booked me before. He thought he was showing me only one yellow card. I don’t think he would have booked me if he had known.”
The decision angered Ivanauskas. “The sending off cost us the match,” he said.
“I understand what the first booking was for but there was no tackle when he was shown the second yellow so I can’t understand that. Bruno was also angry about it in the dressing-room. It wasn’t easy after that but it wasn’t easy when we had the full team.
“The players are angry about losing the goals in the last few minutes. The Greeks were very strong and experienced but after we scored we had three or four chances to score another goal. We know what we have to do now to win the tie — we have to go there and win.”
His adversary, Lorenzo Serra Ferrer, felt vindicated by the result as would any manager who had seen his team have 30 shots on target without reward until the final two found the net. “We always play to win and we were certain that we would,” the AEK coach said.
“We were successful and we will take that score into the second leg where we will be stronger and fitter. I think we should have scored in the first half although there were spells in the second half where we did not play as well but we won 13 or 14 corners and on 10 or 12 occasions we came close to scoring.
“And you have to understand that this was our first competitive game. Hearts have played quite a few games so it wasn’t easy for us, especially because we were away from home.”
In truth, though, home — whether it is Tynecastle or Murrayfield — hold precious little comfort for Hearts in Europe over the past decade. They have lost to Real Mallorca, Bordeaux, Schalke 04 and even Ferençvaros on their own soil. The real Athens can hardly be any more unkind than the Athens of the North.
