The Heart of the matter

Scotsman Editorial 5 June 1990

The Heart of the matter

HEARTS' spectacular bid to take over their ancient rivals is a novel departure for Scottish football. Whether it is a desirable one is another matter.

When Edinburgh's favourite footballing sons were first mustered for action — Hearts in 1874 and Hibs the following year — it came about because there was a great hunger for football in the land. There always had been, since the first unedifying brawls which led to much royal displeasure in the fifteenth century. After the formation of the Scottish Football Association, the game was ready. Pick the teams and let's play.

We have come a long way from this clarity of purpose. Not that the principals involved are in the slighter about their intentions, but their methods do not seem to have much to do with the reason the clubs were formed in the beginning. They were certainly never set up to be bought and sold like so many brickworks. They are football clubs, whose being and existence are owed to generations of devotees whose emotions and loyalties and cash have gone into the building of what have become the sporting institutions of a city.

The presence of the two teams, their progress, failures, crises and aspirations have become woven into the fabric of Edinburgh life. People's daily business is enlivened — often to the point of apoplexy — by Monday morning jokes, barbs, sly digs and intense discussion occasioned by the fate of the sides on Saturday afternoons.

To anyone brought up on this fare, the demise of one club or the other or the loss of identity of both is unthinkable. For Hibs' followers the pain is that much more acute, for no matter how attractive the financial and commercial advantages of such a take-over, the fact remains that they will be the people wrenched from their roots in Leith and they will have been bought by Hearts — surely the ultimate defeat

It is important, however, to consider the effect on both clubs rather than the one in isolation. There does not 'appear to have been any statement on what a post-merger club would be called — and that's a thorny one.

The Hearts following is unlikely to be any more enamoured by the imposition of another name than the Hibs following (presuming the latter faction hasn't emigrated in the meantime).

The nub of the matter is that the style of the deal has very little to do with football, the people who play it, the people who follow it. It has everything to do with big business. There is no doubt that it is excellent business, but the financial decisions stem more from boardrooms in the City than football stands in Scotland.

No doubt Mr David Rowlands and his cohorts will see such a transaction as a deal well done, but it has been approached in a detached and distant manner, in which respect for tradition, for the paying customers and, indeed, a way of life seems to have been a marginal consideration.