SPL Saturday April 2nd 2005

Celtic 0

Hearts 2

0:1 Miller 8
0:2 Burchill 19

Att: 59,562

MIB: Hugh Dallas

Celtic: Marshall McNamara Balde Varga Henchoz Petrov Lennon Thompson McGeady Bellamy Hartson
subs
Wallace for Henchoz 36
Maloney for McGeady 68

Remember those hard won victories on Inverness and Dundee? Well we just threw one of them down the toilet.

This was a hell of time for every player in the team to have a nightmare; Hartson was immobile, Bellamy was always in the wrong spot, McGeady always tried one trick too many, Balde thought he could play football, etc. etc.

The worst part about today was the fact that most people turned up brimming with enthusiasm; our last home game had been the demolition of Dunfermline and since then we'd turned in some excellent away performances. Hopefully this was Celtic moving up through the gears for the run in. Nope. Instead we fell apart.

Hearts took the lead after the defence failed to deal with a free kick; Marshall parrying out the first attempt, but helpless as the rest of the team failed to react to the loose ball. That was a set back, but hey, it's Hearts, we should be able to play them off the pitch.

Instead the team became even more disjointed. If the first goal was down to poor defending how to categorise the second? One of the first things O'Neill did when he arrived at Celtic was tell the defence to quit playing football under pressure; if any forward was within five yards get rid of the ball and if in doubt put it in row Z and worry about it later. What Henchoz was thinking when instead of heading the ball safely into the stand he directed straight to the feet of his grateful opponent we can only guess at. We don't need to guess what his manager's feeling about it was though, after said opponent had played in Burchill for the second goal directly from Henchoz's aberration the big Swiss found himself hooked off the park (and directed to Central Station to await the next train to Liverpool)

. The atmosphere didn't exactly lighten during the break when the chairman appeared on the pitch for some presentation or other as he got the Fergus treatment.

In the second half we simply didn't do enough. The best we could muster was a Hartson effort that the keeper comfortably saved. If Celtic do eventually triumph in the league we've certainly not done it the easy way. If we don't we only have ourselves to blame.