A FULL CHAPTER EXTRACT FROM REMINISCING WITH LEGENDS
At the conclusion of a fulfilling three-year stint with Crewe Alexandra in which he had been a team-mate of players such as Neil Lennon and Danny Murphy, a 22-year-old Robbie Savage was looking for a new club in order to progress his career to the next level.
The four genuine options put on the table by George Urquhart, the agent of the burgeoning blond midfielder, were Leicester City, Crystal Palace, Malmo and Heart of Midlothian. The fact the former Manchester United youngster and Urquhart - a Scot who had played for St Mirren briefly in the late 1960s - felt compelled to embark on a four-hour drive from England to Edinburgh to speak to Jim Jefferies in the first week of July 1997 served as an indicator of the eye-catching progress that had been made by Hearts in the manager’s first two years in charge. Just a over a month previously, Savage had made his first start for Wales in a friendly at Rugby Park against a Scotland side in which Hearts defender David Weir was making his international debut.
The Welshman later confirmed in his autobiography - published in 2011 - that “as soon as I talked to Jim Jefferies, I wanted to sign for Hearts”. Unfortunately for the Tynecastle club, Savage had agreed to speak to his other suitors before making a decision, and the lure of joining Martin O’Neill at English Premiership side Leicester ultimately proved too strong to resist. “I knew he would be a terrific signing for us if we could get him,” recalls Jefferies. “He came up to Pinkie (the school playing fields in Musselburgh where Hearts trained) with his agent and we had a chat about what he was looking for in his life. He was really keen to consider us. He didn’t train with us because he arrived just after we’d finished training but he met the boys and he liked the set-up. It would’ve been a real feather in our cap if we’d been able to get him because he’s an inspirational character and his enthusiasm for the game was great. You wouldn’t say he was the most technically-gifted player ever but he certainly had enough skill to have shone in our team. It was disappointing that we couldn’t get him but he phoned us up and was very apologetic about it. He said it was touch and go between Leicester and us. He wasn’t the big celebrity figure he is now but he was certainly a good player and it would’ve been a coup if we were able to get him. That’s how well we were going at that time though; good players knew we were on the up and were keen to consider joining us.”
As disappointing as it was that he chose to join Leicester instead, the failure to land Savage - who went on to become an established Premier League player and a passionate football pundit - was never going to blow Hearts off course. Under Jefferies, this was a club with the wind in their sails. Having reached a cup final and finished fourth in both of his first two seasons as Hearts manager, while also carrying out the significant change in personnel he promised, the challenge for Jefferies in year three was to take it to the next level and ensure his impressive rebuild would bring some genuine success to Tynecastle. Could he lift Hearts into the top three for the first time since Joe Jordan led them to second place in the Premier Division in 1991/92? After finishing 28 and then 23 points adrift of second-place Celtic in his first two seasons at Hearts, could he give the two Glasgow sides any kind of challenge to think about as Celtic, who were under the charge of Dutchman Wim Jansen, prepared to try and stop Rangers clinching an historic tenth title in a row? And after finishing runners-up in each of his previous two seasons, could he go a step further in the knockout competitions and finally bring a trophy back to Gorgie for the first time since Tommy Walker presided over League Cup glory in 1962?
Although the signing of Savage would have added some extra sheen, Jefferies was clearly pretty satisfied with the make-up of his squad as there would be only two new arrivals in the summer of 1997; this was in stark contrast to the frenzied 21st-century transfer windows at Hearts which have often involved in excess of ten players being recruited. With Stephane Adam having already agreed to join from Metz just before the final match of the previous season, the only other new face to check in at Tynecastle for the start of the 97/98 campaign was Thomas Flögel, a 26-year-old Austrian internationalist who had hitherto spent his entire career with Austria Vienna. The highly-regarded midfielder had been on trial with Dundee United before Hearts got wind of his availability via Brian Whittaker, a former defender at Tynecastle who went on to play under Jefferies at Falkirk in the early 90s. Tragically, Whittaker, who was working as an agent at the time, lost his life in a car crash just two months after helping facilitate Flögel’s transfer to Hearts.
With the esteemed trio of John Colquhoun, Gary Mackay and Craig Levein - all former teammates of Whittaker’s - having departed the club within a busy spell of ins and outs the previous season, only five of the 22 first-team players Jefferies initially inherited now remained at Hearts: Dave McPherson, Gary Locke, Kevin Thomas, Stephen Frail and John Robertson, who had just signed a new one-year contract amid reported interest from French clubs Guingamp, Le Havre and Sochaux. By the end of July 1997, the squad was made up almost exclusively of players signed, promoted or valued by Jefferies. Within two years of taking the job, the manager had assembled a group that would have permitted him, if he wished, to send out a starting XI of Gilles Rousset, McPherson, Weir, Paul Ritchie, Gary Naysmith, Flögel, Stefano Salvatori, Stephen Fulton, Colin Cameron, Neil McCann and Adam. Incidentally, this was an XI that would never once start together in a league match. “I was impressed with the Hearts squad straight away,” recalls Flögel. “There were so many good players. I remember thinking McCann was fast as fuck; you didn’t want to be against him in the sprint training.”
After a typically gruelling, character-building pre-season under Jefferies and Billy Brown - including friendlies away to Blyth Spartans, Hull City, Berwick Rangers and Grimsby Town as well as a 3-2 home win over Rangers in a testimonial match for McPherson in which former Scotland rugby internationalist Gavin Hastings made a cameo appearance for Hearts - the competitive action began with a formidable-looking trip to Ibrox in the league. On a sunny early-August Monday evening in Govan, Hearts - sporting their new white away kit freshly produced by Olympic Sportswear - hoped to deliver an early-season statement of intent in front of a live Sky Sports audience. Rousset, Frail, Weir, Ritchie, Neil Pointon, Flögel, Grant Murray, Salvatori, Fulton, McCann and Jim Hamilton were the eleven men sent out to kick off what would prove to be one of the most exhilarating campaigns in Hearts’ entire history. It got off to something of a false start, however, as Rangers eased to a 3-1 win, with their lethal new Italian striker Marco Negri scoring a double shortly before half-time and Alec Cleland adding a late third just before substitute Cameron pulled one back for Hearts with a lovely finish from inside the box. With Celtic having lost away to Hibs the previous day, this was Walter Smith’s side asserting themselves as hot favourites to go on and win a tenth league title in a row.
For Hearts, it had been a chastening night, particularly so for Flögel whose competitive debut ended with him being substituted at half-time. Adam, meanwhile, came on for the last 17 minutes and set up Cameron’s goal with an excellent cross. Despite their baptism of fire in Glasgow, the presence of the two new arrivals from overseas had added to Fulton’s optimism for the campaign ahead. “I knew straight away we had a good team that season,” Fulton insists. “I know we lost at Ibrox on the opening day but I remember still feeling good about the team. After that game, we started winning pretty much every week.”
Hearts subsequently enjoyed a three-game winning burst, with Coca-Cola Cup victories away to Livingston and Raith Rovers either side of an emphatic 4-1 triumph at home to Aberdeen in which goals from Robertson, Fulton, Cameron and substitute Flögel cancelled out Mike Newell’s early opener for the visitors. “From the friendly games and even after losing the first game at Rangers, you could feel there was quality in the team,” says Adam. “We built up a good spirit in pre-season, with the mix of the players who were there already and the new players, and I could feel early on that we had a team that could challenge at the top. After the Rangers game, we were 1-0 down against Aberdeen and we came straight back into the game and beat them convincingly. From that point, you could feel the confidence and the quality was there. You could feel something good was going to happen.”
In addition to Hearts’ magnificent performance against the Dons, that match was also notable for being the first played in front of the newly-built Gorgie Stand, albeit with no supporters in it on this occasion. There were few people inside Tynecastle that day more satisfied than Leslie Deans, who - as part of an agreement from the start of their dual reign as Hearts’ majority shareholders in 1994 - had earlier that year taken over as chairman from Chris Robinson, who in turn became chief executive. “I take a lot of pleasure from the fact that in my time as chairman I was able to oversee and complete the total refurbishment of Tynecastle to give us four stands - the three new ones and the existing main stand which was replaced in 2017 under Ann Budge,” says Deans. “I look back on that with a great degree of pride and the club was able to move forward as a result. The alternative would have been a significantly reduced capacity which wouldn’t have made things viable because at that time things were beginning to happen on the pitch.”
Indeed they were. Sadly the same couldn’t be said for Jeremy Goss, whose underwhelming spell in Gorgie came to an end a little over a year after his much-hyped arrival from Norwich City. The veteran Welsh internationalist - an unused sub in the win over Aberdeen - departed by mutual consent after being unable to command regular game time under Jefferies, managing only eight starts and 15 appearances in total. “A case of wrong move, wrong time, wrong club,” was Goss’s rueful verdict of his time at Hearts, as delivered in his autobiography in 2014.
After the euphoria of dismantling Aberdeen, Hearts suffered a setback in their next league match when they lost 2-1 away to Dunfermline Athletic. Cameron viewed that poor display at East End Park as a turning point for a team he knew was capable of far better than a return of just three points from their opening three league games. “That was a bit of a kick up the backside for us,” the midfielder recalls.
Hearts’ next test was away to a table-topping Hibs side managed by Hamilton and McCann’s old Dundee boss Jim Duffy, and featuring Weir’s former Falkirk colleague John Hughes, Cameron’s old Raith Rovers team-mates Tony Rougier and Stevie Crawford, as well as Jean-Marc Adjovi-Boco, an old adversary of Adam and Rousset’s from their time in France. McCann flicked in the only goal of the game with a deft finish with the outside of his left foot before gleefully cupping his ears to the home supporters. That 1-0 derby victory, on the weekend of Princess Diana’s death in Paris, would be the first of five league wins in a row for Jefferies’ team. “Hibs had started well and had already beaten Celtic but we went across there and did a number on them,” recalls McCann. “The feeling of winning that game was brilliant. We’d had a couple of defeats at the start of that season but you could tell there was a bit of a spark about us and that it was only a matter of time before it took off. That game at Easter Road was a bit of a catalyst for us and after that you could feel us going through the gears.”
Hearts’ next fixture took them back to Dunfermline - scene of their recent league defeat - for a midweek Coca-Cola Cup quarter-final tie. This time the performance was far better and the Edinburgh side could consider themselves hugely unfortunate as former Hearts winger Allan Moore scored the only goal of the tie in extra-time to take the Pars into the semi-finals. It was a hammer blow for a Hearts side who had reached the final of the competition the previous year and had genuine aspirations of winning a trophy. “That was the night when I realised we we were a really good team,” says Rousset. “I remember it well, we were fantastic; we played really, really well and were very unfortunate to lose. And after that game, I could tell by the reaction of the guys that we had a very good team because they were fucking unhappy; you know, really, really upset by the elimination. After that we bounced back very well and had a fantastic season.”
A couple of headed goals from Hamilton gave Hearts a well-deserved 2-1 win at St Johnstone in the next league game before a victory by the same scoreline at home to a Dundee United side who had finished third the previous season. In what was the first match with spectators in the new Gorgie Stand, Hearts’ opener was an own goal from United defender Steven Pressley, a man who would be wearing maroon a year later. With Kjell Olofsson equalising right on half-time for the visitors, Robertson - who by this stage was having to get accustomed to the role of substitute - emerged from the bench to score the winner and send Hearts to the top of the league for the first time.
While belief levels were already starting to soar in the dressing-room, perhaps the first real indication to those outside Tynecastle that something special was beginning to unfold for Jefferies’ team came on the last weekend of September when they travelled through to Kilmarnock and romped to a 3-0 win in which all the goals - scored by Weir, Hamilton and Adam - came in the first half. Remarkably, Hearts performed an even more impressive demolition job away from home the following weekend as they raced into a three-goal lead after just 20 minutes on their way to beating Motherwell 4-1. Cameron, Adam, McCann and Hamilton were the men on target on a day when 4000 jubilant Jambos bounded out of Fir Park singing “we shall not be moved”, a chant traditionally reserved in football for supporters of buoyant, table-topping sides. “Honestly, there were times in that season when we would absolutely blitz teams, just blow them off the pitch with our sheer ferocity and pace,” recalls McCann. “That game at Motherwell, 3-0 up after 20 minutes, you’re just thinking ‘hang on a minute, we’re a good side.’”
Throughout this five-game winning run that had taken Hearts top of the league going into the October international break, 23-year-old Allan McManus - primarily a centre-back - was holding down the right-back position. This meant Locke, who had endured an injury-disrupted summer, had to bide his time on the substitutes’ bench while his colleagues took the Premier Division by storm. “The gaffer moved me out to right-back for defensive duties but by that stage I was just absolutely delighted to be on the pitch in that team,” says McManus. “Looking back, to play the amount of games I did within that talented squad is something I can be proud of. Lockey at that time was a fantastic right-back destined for bigger and better things so when he got himself fully fit he was always likely to get back in.”
With the likes of McCann, Hamilton, Cameron and Adam causing havoc for opposing defences, Hearts bolstered their attack further when they paid £90,000 to sign Angolan winger Jose Quitongo from Hamilton Accies. “It was a big step up for me,” says Quitongo. “Hearts are a big club and they had started the season really well. They had a very strong team. I was just like ‘wow’. I was so excited to be joining them and the boys made me feel very comfortable straight away.”
Quitongo completed his move to Tynecastle on the eve of a benefit match for Craig Levein against Hibs. With an attendance of just 2711 at his testimonial match against Coventry City two years earlier, it was a reflection of the feelgood factor now gripping the club that just over 8000 turned up to honour the retired centre-back second time around. In a friendly staged a day after Scotland had defeated Latvia at Celtic Park to secure their place at the upcoming World Cup in France, the Hearts team featured popular former players Levein, Mackay, Colquhoun, Pasquale Bruno and Scott Crabbe, while Hibs’ team included Monaco midfielder John Collins - fresh from his exploits with the national team 24 hours earlier - and TV personality John Leslie. The Easter Road side won the match 1-0 through a goal from 19-year-old Andrew Newman.
Hearts had bigger fish to fry, however. In their next league game, the leaders were hosting a Celtic side who sat three points beneath them in third place, albeit with a game in hand. Having won six of their seven league matches since losing at Rangers on the opening night, Hearts were determined to show they meant business by adding one of the Glasgow sides to their growing list of scalps. “If you have any aspirations of winning the league you’ve got to beat Rangers and Celtic, and after winning five in a row we were obviously confident going into that one,” recalls Cameron. Hearts fell flat, however, and goals in the first 21 minutes from Marc Rieper and Henrik Larsson - in the Swede’s first season in Scotland - were enough to secure Celtic a deserved 2-1 win. With the defeat causing them to drop from first place to third, having played a game more than both Rangers and Celtic, Hearts’ bubble was widely deemed to have burst. In an era when the Old Firm were generally monopolising the top two places in the league, most people outwith the Tynecastle club believed they had seen the last of Jefferies’ team at the top of the league. “Although we were disappointed to lose, we weren’t too downbeat because we had been on a good run and we felt if we kept going, we could get on another run,” says Cameron.
And sure enough, Hearts dusted themselves down and set about embarking on a fresh six-game winning streak. They rounded off their October schedule with a 3-1 midweek victory at home to Dunfermline in which Locke made his first start of the season and McCann, Adam and Fulton were the men on target. “There were goals coming from all angles,” says McCann.
Underlining the level of goal threat in the Hearts squad, Jefferies changed two of his strikers for the early-November trip to Aberdeen and still came away with an emphatic 4-1 victory. Adam missed out through suspension while Hamilton dropped to the bench after failing to score in his two previous matches. Robertson came in for his first start since the victory at Hibs two months previously and the veteran was partnered in attack by Flögel, who was given his first start since the opening-night defeat at Ibrox. On a grim, wintry afternoon in the Granite City, the Austrian marked his surprise return to the team with a double as Hearts scored all four of their goals in the second half to cancel out Dean Windass’s first-half opener. McCann and Robertson, with a deflection off Gary Smith, got the other two. As well as being the second time in the opening 11 league games of the season that Hearts had come from behind to beat Aberdeen 4-1, the match at Pittodrie represented the fourth occasion they had dismantled an opponent by a three-goal margin. It was particularly memorable for Quitongo as he made his debut as a late substitute. “I remember that match well,” says Quitongo, erupting into a fit of giggles. “Everybody was supposed to wear a tracksuit but the boys told me ‘Jose, we wear a suit to Aberdeen’. I turned up wearing a suit and they were all in a tracksuit! The boys were all laughing, man.”
Within weeks of his arrival, the charismatic Quitongo was in with the bricks at Hearts, adding to dressing-room camaraderie off the pitch and influencing football matches on it. The little Angolan showman marked his home debut by scoring the second goal in a 2-0 home win over Hibs after replacing Robertson, who had opened the scoring early on. Tynecastle was in raptures once more the following weekend when a last-minute penalty from Cameron secured a 2-1 win over St Johnstone after Flögel’s opener had been cancelled out by George O’Boyle. And there was yet more drama in Gorgie in the next match when rampant Hearts beat Kilmarnock 5-3 courtesy of an Adam hat-trick and goals from McCann and substitute Quitongo. “I know Killie kept coming back at us but we just blew them away with our attacking power,” says McCann. There was an air of invincibility building around this swashbuckling Hearts side. “It wasn’t just the fact we were winning, it was the way we were winning,” says Fulton. “We were running over the top of teams. When you’re winning games like we were, you don’t think you’re going to lose games.”
Incredibly, with everyone having played 14 games, Hearts were four points clear of second-place Rangers at the top of the table, five points clear of Celtic, and a whopping 14 points ahead of fourth-place Dundee United as they headed to Newcastle for their Christmas party at the end of November. They had no game that weekend due to the fact United, their scheduled opponents, had made it to the Coca-Cola Cup final, where they would lose 3-0 to Celtic at Ibrox. After that one-sided final, Murdo MacLeod, Celtic’s assistant manager, endorsed Hearts as legitimate rivals to his own team and Rangers in the battle for the championship. “Make no mistake, Hearts will be tough to stop,” he said. “They are up there on merit and nobody should underestimate their title credentials.”
At the very moment those words of praise were leaving the lips of MacLeod, Hearts’ players were merry-making in England’s north east, intoxicated by the dual combination of alcohol and table-topping joie de vivre. The positive effect of this close-knit squad’s latest social gathering was temporarily dashed, however, when they returned to Edinburgh to find they had become front-page news in the Daily Record, accused of having behaved in a “loud and obnoxious” manner by another diner at Newcastle restaurant Sabatini’s. Inappropriate songs, the smashing of glasses and plates, and dancing on tables were among the antics the woman pinpointed as having ruined her night. The Hearts players were furious at what they were reading. Jefferies called the restaurant to check it out for himself and found that staff had no issue with the way his squad had behaved. The Hearts manager said the story was “ridiculous” and had been “blown out of all proportion” as he accused the Glasgow-based newspaper of “trying to do this every year”. A few days later, in his weekly column in the Edinburgh Evening News, Locke revealed that the players had held a meeting and after “getting the same treatment over the last three years by the newspaper in question”, they had “unanimously decided that no-one will be speaking to any reporters from that newspaper”.
“That report caused us a lot of problems and it wasn’t true,” recalls Pointon, the chief organiser of the party. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We had our own private room in the restaurant so we didn’t bother anybody else. A woman had told the paper we’d ruined her birthday but that was nonsense; she came in and had her photograph taken with the players and we bought her a bottle of champagne, so I don’t see how we ruined her night. It happened at a time when any sort of story about footballers on a night out was becoming big news. We were doing well, we were at the top of the league, which probably added to it all from the newspaper’s perspective. But it really stuck in my throat because any time we went out, we tried to do things sensibly, and still somebody found a way of coming up with a stupid report.”
Occasional nights out were key to this Hearts squad generating a level of togetherness few of the players involved ever experienced at other times in their career. “It was the best bunch of boys I ever played with in terms of having a laugh and socialising and things like that,” says Fulton, whose sentiment was echoed by others. With such a strong bond in the group, and a genuine belief in their ability to sustain a title challenge, Hearts weren’t about to let the fallout from their trip to Newcastle knock them off course. On their return to action on the first weekend of December, goals from Cameron and Flögel secured a 2-0 home win over Motherwell. “It was really impressive that we managed to get in the newspaper,” laughs Flögel. “We had a really nice night out in Newcastle - and probably had a bit too much to drink for our own good. The gaffer wasn’t happy about it and said we had to make up for it in the next game. Thankfully we beat Motherwell and everything was forgotten about. When you’re successful you can afford to go out and have a beer now and again.”
Hearts - having now won 11 of their last 12 league matches - ended the weekend a point ahead of Rangers, who had played a game more, and a remarkable seven clear of third-place Celtic. “We started the season pretty well and just managed to get the momentum going,” recalls Hamilton. “Celtic and Rangers were struggling a little bit in games, while we kept winning against the teams that we probably didn’t beat the year before in a consistent manner. We were just coming out the stalls really quick and sometimes having the game wrapped up after half an hour.”
While the threat of defending champions Rangers in particular was still taken seriously, there was now a genuine belief at Hearts that they could win their first league title since 1960. “At that point, we were thinking ‘we’re in with a right chance here,’” says Cameron. “Okay, we’d lost to Rangers and Celtic, but the only other defeat we had up to that point was away to Dunfermline.”
Hearts missed a chance to re-establish a four-point lead when - in their game in hand over Rangers - they were held to a 0-0 midweek draw away to Dundee United on a night most notable for the fact such a large travelling support descended on Tannadice that around 400 Jambos were locked out. This led to calls for all of Hearts’ matches to be made all-ticket.
Jefferies’ team were two points clear as they prepared for a critical, mettle-testing mid-December double-header against the Old Firm, with Celtic away followed by a home game against Rangers. “We had shown we could beat everyone else in the league but we knew if we were serious about winning the league, we had to do something in our games against the Old Firm,” says Cameron.
Unfortunately, Hearts got the worst possible outcome of zero points from these two fixtures as they lost 1-0 at Celtic Park after a late goal from Craig Burley before crashing to a 5-2 defeat at home to ten-man Rangers. That demoralising afternoon - Gordon Durie scored a hat-trick for the visitors who had Rino Gattuso sent off with almost a quarter of the match remaining - would go down as the last one in which Robertson scored a competitive goal for the club at Tynecastle. Hearts spent Christmas Day in third place, two points behind Rangers and one below Celtic. While they would have taken this scenario at the start of the season, there was a feeling in the Hearts camp that things could and should have been that bit better. “We didn’t have a great December,” rues Cameron. “When we lost those games against Celtic and Rangers, you start thinking ‘have we really got a chance because whenever we come up against the Old Firm, we’re not able to get victories.’ That was four games against them with no points. Even if we’d got one victory out of those four games, I think that would have had a massive effect on us with regard to our chances.”
Two days after Christmas, Hearts travelled to Dunfermline and got themselves back on track with a 3-1 victory. Hamilton, who had been the subject of interest from St Johnstone in early December during a period when he spent eight successive games on the bench, returned to the starting lineup and opened the scoring. There was also an own goal from Pars goalkeeper Ian Westwater and a long-range strike from Salvatori which would prove to be the Italian’s only goal for the club. He celebrated by running gleefully towards Jefferies in the dugout. Hearts’ supporters were admonished afterwards by Robinson after a champagne bottle and coins were thrown on to the East End Park pitch.
Up to second place after Celtic had lost away to St Johnstone, Hearts were buoyed further ahead of the New Year’s Day derby at home to bottom-of-the-table Hibs when it was revealed that Jefferies - whose stock level was sky high - had signed a new five-year contract, tying him to the club until the end of 2002. It looked like a perfect start to 1998 was on the cards when Fulton scored twice in the opening ten minutes to put Hearts 2-0 up. Jefferies sensed a chance to avenge the 7-0 defeat he had endured as a Hearts player against Hibs exactly 25 years previously. “We were 2-0 up and started like a train, firing on all cylinders,” recalls the manager. “Colin Cameron had a header hit the bar at 2-0. If that had gone in, we’d have gone on to win comfortably. Even Jim Duffy said that afterwards. We should have been out of sight, but Hibs got a goal out of nothing and got back into the game.”
Second-half goals from Andy Walker and Pat McGinlay gave Hibs a 2-2 draw their second-half play probably merited and Hearts were left to lament the squandering of a golden chance to have returned to the top of the table, with third-place Celtic going on to defeat leaders Rangers the following evening. With 11 days until their next fixture - a Monday-night trip to St Johnstone - Hearts flew to Portugal for a five-day warm-weather training camp at the luxury Club Barringtons complex in Vale de Lobo. In his Evening News column, Locke explained that Hearts were put through something resembling a “mini pre-season” at their Algarve base as they sought to banish any lingering negativity from a festive period in which they had won only one of their previous five games.
Jefferies had selection issues to ponder for the trip to Perth, with regular starters Pointon, Salvatori and Locke all suspended. In their place came Frail, who hadn’t started since the 5-3 win over Kilmarnock; McPherson, making his first start of the season following injury issues; and Naysmith, who had featured only once previously in the season due to a combination of injury and diminished form. The 19-year-old left-back marked his return to the side by scoring a spectacular volley from the edge of the box and delivering a man-of-the-match performance in a 3-2 victory. Hamilton netted the other two goals. Hearts looked on course for back-to-back victories for the first time since November when they led 2-1 at Kilmarnock through a McCann goal and a Gus MacPherson own goal, but the hosts equalised with 14 minutes left. This 2-2 draw counted as a disappointment considering they had won so convincingly at Rugby Park earlier in the season. “Although we didn’t lose any games between December and April, we were a bit hit and miss; there were too many draws in that period,” says Cameron.
That match in Ayrshire saw Frail - a late substitute - make his last appearance for the club before he headed south to join Tranmere Rovers for £100,000. The former Dundee right-back, who could also operate in central midfield, had been touted for a Scotland call-up prior to sustaining a serious knee injury in March 1995, but he proved unable to get back to peak form and fitness in the three years thereafter. The departure of Frail - who would get a brief chance to manage Hearts under Vladimir Romanov some ten years later - was a rare piece of transfer activity in or out of Tynecastle in the 97/98 campaign. Jefferies, who had a core group of around eight players who would usually start when fit, was pretty content with his squad. He ran the rule over various trialists, including Austrian defender Gunter Zeller, former Manchester United defender William Prunier and Belgian midfielder Axel Smeets, but ultimately deemed that they weren’t ready to come in and make an instant contribution to a side operating on a different level to most - if not all - other teams in Scotland. The signing of Twente Enschede’s former Motherwell left-back Rab McKinnon on a pre-contract for the start of the 98/99 campaign showed that Jefferies, although in the thick of a three-way title race, wasn’t taking his eye off the ball with regard to the sustained improvement of his team in the longer term.
After a 2-0 win at home to Dundee United at the end of January in which Cameron scored a double, Hearts were locked together with Rangers and Celtic on the 48-point mark; the three teams separated at the top of the table only by goal difference. When Rangers were held to a surprise 1-1 draw at home to Dunfermline on the first Saturday of February, Hearts and Celtic had the incentive of knowing that a victory in their eagerly-awaited showdown at Tynecastle the following day would take them two points clear of the Ibrox side at the summit. It looked like Celtic would be the team to do just that as they led through Jackie McNamara’s first-half goal. However, substitute Quitongo forced in a scrappy 93rd-minute equaliser, sparking one of the wildest crowd celebrations ever witnessed inside Tynecastle and ensuring the three teams remained tied at the top for another week. “Oh man, I still get abuse from all my Celtic-supporting pals to this day for that goal,” laughs Quitongo. “I’ve never seen Tynecastle rock like that; the place went mental, absolutely mental!”
With Hearts claiming their first point of the season against one of the Glasgow clubs, McCann believes that wintry Sunday of Gorgie bedlam was the day when many people truly started to believe the Tynecastle side might just have the bottle and resilience required to become the first non-Old Firm side to win the league since Aberdeen claimed back-to-back titles under the great Alex Ferguson in 1984 and 1985. “What an incredible atmosphere that was!” exclaims McCann. “I actually had a swipe at it before wee Jose put it in the net, but if you watch the footage back when Jose scores, the camera is actually shaking. That was very, very real; Tynecastle was rocking. I remember Jim Jefferies and Murdo MacLeod were going at it at full-time. I think Murdo was annoyed about the amount of time the officials had added on because the full-time whistle went just after we scored. Celtic were furious but I believe the Hearts fans at that point were thinking ‘we’re gonna win the league’ because that was a huge result for us.”
That remarkable match against Celtic also marked the first attended in more than 30 years by Alfie Conn, one of Hearts’ greatest-ever players who had never previously set foot in Tynecastle since being made to feel unwelcome by the club when his request to buy tickets for a match in the 1960s was declined. With just three months of the campaign remaining, Jefferies’ players knew they had given themselves a real chance of writing their own names into club folklore alongside luminaries like Conn, who had been key to the club’s success in the mid-1950s.
Next stop on this stirring Jambo adventure was Motherwell on Saturday 21st February, and it threw up the most dramatic match of the campaign for the huge travelling support. With Jefferies staying at home to nurse a back problem, assistant Brown took charge of the team. It looked like being a disastrous day for Hearts as goals from Owen Coyle and Willie Falconer put the hosts 2-0 up within 37 minutes. Staring down a barrel, the visitors suddenly “turned on the gas and blew them away”, as McCann puts it. Hamilton pulled one back just before the break and once the big striker equalised just before the hour mark, there was only going to be one winner: goals from Fulton and Adam in the closing 25 minutes secured a stunning 4-2 victory to keep Hearts level at the top, alongside Celtic and Rangers on the 52-point mark. “That’s one of the games from that season that really sticks in my head,” says Hamilton. “We were 2-0 down less than 40 minutes into the game thinking ‘oh no, what’s happening here?’ The boys actually talked about this later, if we went in 2-0 down, we could imagine Jim being on the phone from his house screaming his head off. Thankfully I managed to score just before half-time to make it 2-1 and that calmed us down a wee bit, and in the second half we were brilliant.”
It was the second game in succession Hearts had come from behind to pick up a significant result. “That was a big game for me because it showed everyone we had a bit of resilience and fight about us, which we all knew anyway from training with each other,” says McCann.
With Hearts enjoying the rare thrill of being in a title race in late February, they allowed Robertson - who hadn’t started a league game since the New Year derby - to join First Division leaders Dundee on a month’s loan with a view to honing his match sharpness and returning to Tynecastle for the run-in. The form of Hamilton and Adam in particular in the central attacking positions had made it difficult for the veteran to get the regular game-time he had been used to throughout his career. On the same Wednesday night that the legendary Hearts striker made his debut in a 2-1 win away to Partick Thistle which enhanced Dundee’s second-tier title prospects, his parent club were doing likewise by taking Aberdeen apart for a third time at a packed-out Tynecastle. The 3-1 win, achieved by goals from Hamilton, the burgeoning Naysmith and McCann, took Hearts two points ahead of Rangers - who had drawn at Kilmarnock the previous night - and kept them level with Celtic. At this point, Hearts, with 59 goals from 26 league games, were the joint-highest scorers in the whole of Britain alongside Notts County, and even then the English Third Division leaders had the benefit of having played eight games more than Jefferies’ scintillating side.
With the stakes growing higher with each passing game, Hearts faced another serious test of their credentials on the last day of February as they returned to Ibrox, scene of their opening-night 3-1 defeat. “Beat Rangers and you can take the title” was the headline on former Hearts player Eamonn Bannon’s weekly column in the Evening News on the eve of the biggest game of their season yet. The capital’s local paper made the unprecedented move of paying for Evening News advertising boards to adorn the Ibrox touchline in order to help the Hearts players feel more at home inside a stadium where their players and supporters had so often been induced with trepidation as soon as the traditional pre-match tune of “Simply the Best” started reverberating. “I never felt we had any inferiority complex in terms of playing against Celtic and Rangers,” says defender Weir. “Rangers were probably still the better team in terms of having the better players. If I'm being honest, they were probably still the benchmark; the ones you had to beat because they had been winning the league regularly. But we were a confident team and we thought on our day we could go to Ibrox or Celtic Park - or obviously at Tynecastle as well - and were capable of beating Rangers or Celtic.”
On a snowy day in Govan, when an orange ball was required for the first half, Hearts came agonisingly close to achieving this feat. After McCann’s opener was cancelled out by Jorg Albertz’s deflected strike before the break, Hearts looked on course for a momentous victory when Hamilton netted from close range in the 76th minute and celebrated in front of the delirious Hearts fans housed in the bottom tier of the Broomloan Stand. In a match which saw both Rangers defender Richard Gough and his Hearts counterpart Murray sent off in the second half, the visitors’ dreams of what would have been a hugely significant win in the context of the title race were dashed in the most gut-wrenching fashion imaginable when Albertz fired home a second deflected strike of the afternoon deep into stoppage time. “I remember sitting in the dressing-room absolutely devastated after that and the gaffer said ‘that shows how far you’ve come that you’re disappointed leaving Ibrox with a point’,” recalls McCann.
There was at least some solace in the following days for Hamilton and Naysmith when they landed February’s Bell’s player of the month and young player of the month awards respectively. The next league game - the day after former Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers midfielder Lee Makel joined in a £75,000 transfer from Huddersfield Town - brought a frustrating 1-1 draw at home to Kilmarnock, with Hearts showing signs, perhaps for the first time since the turn of the year, of feeling the strain of the title race. After a match in which McPherson’s goal was cancelled out by John Henry in the first half, Killie midfielder Gary Holt expressed surprise at how quickly the home support had turned on their title-chasing players as they clung on for a barely-deserved point largely thanks to Rousset’s heroics between the sticks. Hearts had gone into the match without the injured Adam and Cameron - who had started to feel the effects of a pelvic problem - and their woes were compounded when captain Locke was stretchered off with a serious-looking knee injury, leading to Makel being pitched in for his debut off the bench earlier than planned. Ominously, Hearts - having generally avoided injuries to key men in the first half of the season - were starting to find more of their main men entering the treatment room as the season drew closer to its conclusion. The impact of the two dropped points against Kilmarnock was softened slightly by the fact Rangers and Celtic - who were also feeling the pressure of one of Scotland’s most significant and competitive post-war title races - also slipped up that mid-March weekend.
Two points behind leaders Celtic and three ahead of third-place Rangers, Hearts headed to Tannadice with the backing of 5,000 supporters. Twelve years after many of them had seen the team’s previous genuine title challenge come to a heartbreaking end across the road at Dens Park, this time they were able to depart Tannadice Street with their dreams of glory still intact after an early goal from Hamilton - his 15th of the season - secured a 1-0 win over Dundee United and kept them within two points of Celtic ahead of the following weekend’s top-of-the-table showdown at Parkhead. If Hearts were to win in Glasgow’s east end on the final weekend of March they would be top of the league with just six games to play. Excitement levels were high all week in the capital as an army of 2000 Hearts supporters prepared to make their way along the M8, with chairman Leslie Deans expressing disappointment that the club had been unable to source more tickets. In the build-up, Salvatori described the match as “similar to a cup final” in magnitude. Although Hearts were unable to pull off the game-changing victory they craved in Glasgow, they could be hugely satisfied with a strong display which secured a 0-0 draw and kept them within two points of top spot with half a dozen matches to go.
Of their six remaining fixtures, four were at Tynecastle. In addition, five of them were against sides who languished more than 20 points beneath them in the table. Even their home match against title rivals Rangers looked significantly less daunting in light of the fact Hearts had drawn their previous three matches against the Old Firm and the Ibrox side, who had just sold Paul Gascoigne to Middlesbrough, were in a strange and debilitating predicament of knowing several big names were due to be following manager Smith out the exit door at the end of the campaign. Given the pressure on both Rangers and Celtic - respectively obsessed with achieving and stopping ten in a row - there appeared to be a clear opportunity for Heart of Midlothian to banish the ghouls of 1986 and become champions of Scotland for the first time in 38 years.
All they had to do was hold their nerve and make the most of a fixture list that was as favourable as they could realistically have hoped for at such a critical phase of the season. In the second week of April, Hearts had a midweek game at home to a Motherwell side they had already beaten three times followed by a weekend trip across the city to face a Hibs team adrift at the foot of the table and staring down the barrel of relegation. With Rangers and Celtic due to meet in the final Old Firm game of the season the Sunday after the Edinburgh derby, there was every chance that if - as expected - Hearts had won both of those games, they would have been top of the league. Gallingly for the Edinburgh side, they botched their opportunity. On a nervy night in the Gorgie rain, Hearts looked like eking out a hard-fought win over Motherwell when McCann struck on the hour. However, the hosts - missing the hitherto ever-present and on-form Ritchie from their defence for the first time through injury - looked ill at ease for much of the match and as they dropped deeper and deeper, Coyne equalised for the luminous-yellow-kitted visitors with 11 minutes left after Adam had given away possession cheaply on the half-way line. “That was the week that cost us,” insists assistant manager Brown. “It was a really rainy night, we were sitting in the directors’ box early on before the Motherwell game and the referee came and said ‘I'll put it off if you want’. But we thought ‘well, if we win tonight and we go to Easter Road and win on Saturday, we’ll probably go clear at the top’. Unfortunately Motherwell scored late on and then we went to Easter Road and got beat 2-1. I think we were a better team than Rangers and Celtic but the five points we dropped in those two games, for me, cost us the league.”
Having fallen four points adrift of Celtic after the Motherwell lapse, the Hibs match effectively counted as a last chance for Hearts to haul themselves back into contention. As mid-April sleet fell from the Leith sky, Robertson, back from his short loan stint at Dundee, came off the bench and gave the Tynecastle side a glimmer of hope of reviving their fading title bid when he fired in a 71st-minute free-kick to cancel out Barry Lavety’s opener. It proved to be the little hitman’s last-ever competitive goal for his beloved Hearts but ultimately it wasn’t enough to keep them in the title hunt as Kevin Harper - instrumental in Hibs’ New Year fightback in Gorgie - scored a shock winner for Alex McLeish’s First Division-bound side with ten minutes left. It was Hearts’ first defeat in any competition since the weekend before Christmas and, after Rangers won the Old Firm derby 2-0 at Ibrox the following day, it left them four points behind both of the Glasgow sides with just four games to play. “That Hibs game was the one that cost us,” says Ritchie. “I think if we’d won that weekend at Easter Road we could still have had the chance to win the league. That was the one that knocked the wheels off the league run we were on.”
With the wind well and truly removed from Hearts’ sails, a 1-1 draw with St Johnstone at Tynecastle - their third consecutive home game which ended with that scoreline - followed by a meek 3-0 home defeat by Rangers officially killed off any lingering hopes of Hearts winning the title, leaving the Old Firm to fight it out in the last couple of games. “I felt like we were the equal of the Old Firm that season although that argument is undermined by the fact we couldn’t beat them in the league,” says Fulton. “I genuinely felt we could have gone toe-to-toe with them right to the end. It was just in the closing weeks we let ourselves down against the likes of Kilmarnock, Motherwell and Hibs.”
In their penultimate league fixture, with the pressure of fighting for the title having dissipated, Hearts drew 2-2 against Aberdeen at Pittodrie through goals from McCann and McPherson, who scored three times from defence across his last eight league appearances of the season. At the end of a match which meant little to them in the grand scheme of things, Hearts’ travelling support were roused by news from Edinburgh that city rivals Hibs had officially been relegated following a 2-1 home defeat by Dundee United. On a more poignant note, that early-May Saturday was also the day Justin Fashanu, who had played for Hearts in the 1993/94 season, tragically took his own life.
After six league games in a row without a win, Hearts ended their stirring Premier Division campaign on a high note as they defeated Dunfermline 2-0 at sun-kissed Tynecastle. Adam and teenager Derek Holmes scored the goals on an emotional afternoon which saw McManus, Pointon and, most significantly, Robertson make their final appearances for the club. The victory - followed by a well-deserved lap of honour in front of their proud and appreciative supporters - meant third-place Hearts finished seven points behind champions Celtic and just five adrift of a Rangers side who were left to lick their wounds after ending up without the league title for the first time in a decade. This gallant effort from Hearts was in stark contrast to three years previously when they had required a last-day victory over Motherwell to fend off the threat of relegation, but regret remains a prominent emotion among the players when reflecting on what might have been. “I definitely think to this day we kind of blew it a little bit in the league nearer the end, against the likes of Kilmarnock, Motherwell and St Johnstone at home,” rues Hamilton.
A similar feeling lingers among Hearts’ French contingent. “We felt we could win the league and I think we should have won it, to be honest,” says Adam. “We finished seven points behind Celtic, which hadn’t happened for quite a long time before or after that. We challenged as far as April and then we had a few injuries and dropped a few points that just killed us. Up to April, we were right up there, just two or three points behind them, so, yes, we definitely felt we could have won it.”
Rousset pinpoints an inability to defeat the Old Firm in any of their head-to-heads as the key factor in why Hearts didn’t get the title their magnificent football arguably deserved. “In terms of names, we weren’t equal to Rangers and Celtic, but in terms of the football we played that year we were equal to them,” he says. “We were a very attack-minded team; but that’s why we lost so many times to Celtic and Rangers that season, because we were attacking all the time. They were much more experienced and more clever than us and they let us come on to them and then hit us on the break. I’m not saying we should have won the league, but I think we certainly could have won it. We dropped too many points towards the end but the biggest problem was that we didn’t beat Celtic or Rangers. We lost three games against Rangers and drew one; we drew twice against Celtic and lost twice. We finished only seven points behind Celtic, so the difference was our direct matches against them. It was great because we competed nearly until the end but we were disappointed because we could have won it. It was a sign that we were vastly improved though.”
Captain Locke rues Hearts’ lack of squad depth in comparison to their moneyed Glasgow rivals. “The disappointing thing for me is that we were maybe just one or two signings short of winning the league,” he says. “It’s always difficult to challenge Rangers and Celtic over a season because of the strength in depth they always have and I think we were just a bit short in numbers towards the end when wee Mickey (Cameron) was struggling with his stomach, I was injured and others had a few wee niggles. We had boys with wee niggling injuries that were having to play whereas if we had a wee bit more strength in depth, boys would have been able to miss a game to get themselves fully fit. But with the money the gaffer spent, to challenge Rangers and Celtic right up to the last few games of the season was a brilliant achievement.”
McCann sums up the lingering frustration at spurning an almighty opportunity to break an Old Firm stranglehold on the Scottish championship which, at the time of writing, is well into a fourth decade. “It’s one of the biggest regrets in my career that we got ourselves into such a good position and let so many points slip towards the end of that season,” says the winger, who went on to play for Rangers, Southampton and Scotland. “We lost against a Hibs side who were about to get relegated and drew at home to Kilmarnock, Motherwell and St Johnstone. If we could have got a couple of wins against the Old Firm, it would have changed everything but we just couldn’t get over the line against them. But what really let us down was those results towards the end of the season against Kilmarnock, Motherwell, Hibs and St Johnstone. These teams weren’t in our league as far as I’m concerned. They were nowhere near as good as us but we were probably just lacking that know-how.
“I’ve said many times in my media work over the years that you get a know-how when you win things. When I won titles at Rangers, I found that sometimes when games are going against you, there’s still that belief that you’ve been there before and you know what’s necessary to get over the line. I just think that Hearts side, as great as we were, we just didn’t have that know-how because we hadn’t won anything. I don’t think it was anything to do with the pressure of failure from before because we didn’t carry that burden as we were a new side. We carried the responsibility of trying to win something for a club that hadn’t won something for a long time but the main thing we lacked, for me, was the know-how that the Old Firm generally possess. It was a real shame because, although we finished seven points behind Celtic, I’m telling you now, that Hearts side was every bit as good as the Celtic side that won the title. If we’d have won that league, I don’t think anybody could have said we were lucky.”
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