In the post-match euphoria of the Edinburgh derby, the 40th anniversary of a Hearts landmark passed without comment.
A 1-1 with Dundee at Tynecastle on October 5 1985 was easily forgotten. Just 8512 fans turned up to watch Iain Jardine claim a point for Hearts with a second-half equaliser.
Alex McDonald’s team had lost to Motherwell and Clydebank in their previous two games. There was no hint, no suggestion, of a locomotive gathering speed. Nothing at all.
The following weekend Hearts travelled to Glasgow and pulled off a shock win over Celtic thanks to a John Robertson goal. Thereafter they began to work up a head of steam, the point against Dundee firing the starting gun on a 26-game unbeaten run which propelled them to the brink of the league title.
A point at Dens Park in the final game would have made crowned them champions. When Albert Kidd climbed off the bench to score twice for Dundee in the final seven minutes, Celtic snatched the title – and the green-and-white ribbons have barely left the trophy in the decades since.
Since Aberdeen won their last title in 1985, in fact, the league crown has never left the city of Glasgow. Celtic have won it 22 times with Rangers winning the other 18. Champions in 13 of the last 14 seasons, Celtic’s recent stranglehold renders the William Hill Premiership one of Europe’s most predictable top flights.
It’s so long since Glasgow’s big two faced a beast from the east that, for a generation who’ve known nothing but the same two teams lifting the league trophy, it’s difficult to envisage anyone else winning it ever again.
Now and then there’s a flurry of excitement. Aberdeen took it to the final day in 1991 before losing to Rangers. Jim Jefferies’ Jambos side finished third and won the Scottish Cup seven years later. The flame flickered under George Burley before Vladimir Romanov turned on a water cannon and blew it away.
Now, here we are again, the hint of a challenge from Hearts so novel that many find it hard to get their heads around the idea that Tony Bloom might deliver on his promise to split Celtic and Rangers at the end of this season.
Britain’s smartest gambler has invested £10million in the Tynecastle club and claims that team have ‘a very good chance of at least being second’. Backed by the recruitment expertise of data analytics, Bloom went further when he said he would be ‘very disappointed if, in the next 10 years, we don’t win at least one league title’.
Not everyone buys that. Before a dramatic Edinburgh derby win over Hibernian, BBC Scotland pundits were reluctantly willing to consider the possibility of Hearts pipping a broken Rangers side to second place. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe there might be a genuine push for the title.
It fell to Hearts fans to make the bold statements after Craig Halkett’s winner, Tynecastle vibrating and shaking to what Derek McInnes called the ‘beautiful noise’ of a roaring crowd singing ‘We shall not be moved’.
While pundits jump through verbal hoops to avoid rash statements, supporters can say what they like. Football without hope is futile and, for clubs like Hearts, hope has been absent for too long.
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Sceptics point to Aberdeen’s implosion last season and McInnes knows fine well that fans of other clubs are itching for Hearts to suffer the same collapse. His side have yet to prove that they have staying power. No one knows how they’ll cope with ramped-up expectation. Or how they’ll cope when opponents start lining up with a low block every week.
Yet, so long as Rangers and Celtic continue to look miles off the pace, anything feels possible.
Rangers lurch from one catastrophe to another. You need to go back 23 games to find the last time they kept a clean sheet away from home, another dismal second-half performance against newly promoted Falkirk leaving the board with no choice but to bin Russell Martin.
When things went wrong, the Ibrox boss fell into a bad habit of throwing his players under a bus and questioning their mentality.
The neurosis and angst around Ibrox couldn’t lift until directors held to account by angry fans in a hotel foyer in Graz took remedial action.
When chief executive Patrick Stewart asked punters who they’d appoint instead he missed the point. Eleven points adrift of Hearts, it’s hard to see how things get much worse, whoever they bring in. With Martin in charge they’d struggle to finish second.
Meanwhile, five points behind the leaders heading into yesterday’s game against on-form Motherwell, the champions overcame another laboured, uninspired performance to dig out a late win. How different the roars of relief at full-time would have sounded if they’d failed.
Struggling to create chances and score goals in open play, Motherwell assisted their cause no end by shooting themselves in the foot defensively. None of which alters the fact that Celtic have become a tough watch.
With £77million in the bank, directors are now duty-bound to spend some of that money on a goal-scoring striker and a proper right winger in January. Even if they splash the cash, recent windows offer no guarantee that they’ll spend the money well. They’re better at selling players for a profit than they are at replacing them.
In what proved to be a blood-and-thunder Edinburgh derby low on quality, Hearts got there in the end. And their habit of scoring late goals against Motherwell, Livingston and Hibs offers evidence of a team with the depth of squad and mental strength to avoid the same wretched fate as Jimmy Thelin’s Aberdeen.
Chief executive Andrew McKinlay echoes the view of manager McInnes that Hearts will only accept they’re in a title race if they’re still up there after two full rounds of fixtures.
Even then, it takes a special side to get over the line. After a 2-0 win on a frozen Ibrox pitch on December 28 1985, manager Alex McDonald burst into the visiting dressing room after the game and told his players they were now in a title race. As John Robertson admitted: “We got on the bus outside Ibrox that night thinking, ‘This is it, we’re going to win the league’.” They didn’t.
Titles are never won after seven games, sometimes not till the final seven minutes. The league is still in its infancy, and, while Celtic and Rangers have their issues, there’s no guarantee that will be the case come the business end of the season.
The champions visit Edinburgh at the end this month and, for Hearts, it’s the next significant test of their credentials.
Unlike Celtic, they’ve managed to beat Rangers away and Hibs at home – and if they add Brendan Rodgers’ team to their list of recent scalps, the unbridled joy of Tynecastle on Saturday night will feel like a prayer morning in St Giles’ Cathedral.
