Craig Gordon in brutally honest Hearts assessment as he tells Jambos the only way to stop outside noise
Hearts chief Andrew McKinlay might be avoiding the ‘r’ word.
But Craig Gordon has been round the block enough to know there’s no point hiding from the fact Hearts ARE in a relegation battle. Rock bottom and reeling from another rotten result in Sunday’s defeat to 10-man Kilmarnock, Gordon knows the prospect of taking the plunge if things don’t turn quickly is far from ridiculous.
When the topic of relegation raised it’s head in the wake of the club’s AGM a fortnight ago, McKinlay said he “wasn’t even using that word” and was “confident we will finish in the top six”. But Gordon was brutally honest as he met the media to preview tonight’s do-or-die Euro clash with Petrocub - an occasion the club captain knows is exactly the type of game that can reverse the slide.
A 100th tie in Europe for the Jambos and a place in the last 16 play offs if they win in front of a rammed Tynecastle could be the catalyst for a run to redemption. Something certainly needs to change which after gathering just 13 points from 17 Premiership games.
Asked if they were in a relegation battle, Gordon said: “We are because that’s where we are - there’s no getting away from that. We wouldn’t be in this position if we’d got the points on the board that we feel we should have done, but we haven’t.
“We can’t call it anything else. We need to start winning matches and until we get ourselves far enough away from that end of the table that it doesn’t become a possibility, then that is exactly what it is.
“We need to win football matches. Until we do, the noise is going to be there and people are going to be talking about it. If we don’t want people to talk about it then we know what we have to do.
“There’s always testing times during every player’s career, every club. We need to get ourselves out of it. We need to start now, this is a big opportunity for us to progress in Europe.
“We started the group well and maybe thought that this game might not have mattered as much as it does now. To have one game knowing that if we win the match we’ve qualified for the next round, we’ve got it in our hands. We need to take this opportunity.”
There’s another ‘r’ word that still sends shivers down Jambos: Romanov. A young Gordon lived through much of that era at Tynecastle when madcap Lithuanian bank chief Vladimir Romanov took the Jambos on a wild spending rollercoaster that ultimately ended in administration in 2013.
Gordon had left for Sunderland in 2007. But before that he became part of what was known as The Riccarton Three with Steven Pressley and Paul Hartley, and stood up to the eccentric owner with a pre-written statement explaining the “significant unrest in the dressing room” and the “impossible task” players were faced with in dealing with the owner.
But how does the current situation compare to those times? Gordon said: “It's different. The team on the pitch then was still performing reasonably well despite what was happening off the field.
“That was perhaps a galvanising factor in terms of gelling the team together to get the results. At this time, it's the opposite of that. It's the results that are not coming. It's definitely a different time.
“It's challenging but there's still a way out. We'll fight to find the way out of it and I'm still confident we've got the ability to be able to do that.”
A massive opportunity was missed on Sunday against a Killie side that played 85 minutes with a man down but still emerged with a 1-0 win. The travelling Jambos weren’t slow in voicing their fury which was directed towards the underperming players.
And Gordon said: “We’ll take anything to turn things around. You’d think perhaps when we go and play against a team that goes down to 10 men it might be that.
“It didn’t turn out to be that. We know that it wasn’t great for anybody. I can’t begin to imagine how the fans felt in the stand behind my goal in the second half.
“You can tell that they’re not happy. You can’t blame a single one of them for being unhappy. It was a difficult watch for everyone.”
Gordon has never been relegated in his 23-year professional career. And he’s determined to make sure that record doesn’t change. He said: “It’s not nice. I was at Sunderland and we managed to avoid relegation. We were down there a few times, so that was probably the closest I came. It’s not a nice environment, it’s not nice coming in to work every morning when things are not going well.
“We need to find our way out. We’re the people that are in this predicament and we’ve got the ability to turn it around and still get something out of this season. We need to do that and we need to do it fast.”
It’s over 21 years since Gordon made his Euro debut for his boyhood club in a 1-0 UEFA Cup win in Bordeaux. He’s old enough to remember the last time they made it to the knockout stages too - bowing out to Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup quarter final in 1989 after a famous 1-0 Tynecastle win over the Bundesliga giants thanks to Iain Ferguson goal.
And he knows tonight offers a chance for his team mates to shelve the gloom and write their own place in history. He said: “I vaguely remember the Bayern Munich game in the 80s. I remember my dad talking about it and being here. I’ve never heard the end of that goal ever since.
“Whenever there’s a family gathering he always describes the goal and it gets better and better every time. “I’ve seen it since and it’s probably not as good as he describes it.
“That’s what a European game can bring to the fans, that moment of magic that lives on for years to get a special result. This is a fantastic game to be involved in. To have the ability to get through to the next round of a European competition.
“That’s hardly ever happened in the history of Hearts to get to that stage. We’ve got to see this as an exciting opportunity to get out there, have a go, get after the game.
“Be the hero. Be the person that scores that goal, that makes that crucial tackle to get everybody else going and start heading in the right direction. That’s a fantastic opportunity for us to start that in motion.”
