Click here to have the Fiver sent to your inbox every weekday at 5pm, or if your usual copy has stopped arriving DUSTING OFF OUR RAINCOAT AND GIVING THE SECRETARY A SAUCY SLAP ON THE BUM Scotland has always blazed a trail ahead of England when it comes to association football. In the game’s infancy during the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, the Scots invented passing, dribbling, and talent. In 1967, they showed it was possible for a plook-faced shower from northern Europe to make off with the European Cup, which up to that point had previously been the preserve of Latin types who ate properly and knew how to comb their hair.
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DUSTING OFF OUR RAINCOAT AND GIVING THE SECRETARY A SAUCY SLAP ON THE BUM
Scotland has always blazed a trail ahead of England when it comes to association football. In the game’s infancy during the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, the Scots invented passing, dribbling, and talent. In 1967, they showed it was possible for a plook-faced shower from northern Europe to make off with the European Cup, which up to that point had previously been the preserve of Latin types who ate properly and knew how to comb their hair. Then in the mid 1970s, they introduced the concept of a “Premier” division, specifically designed to slowly but systematically extract all interest from their national league by making sure none of the smaller clubs had a snowball’s chance in the Cairngorm Ski Resort of ever winning the title again.
All these concepts, ideas and capers have since been taken up by the English, who if the truth be told have done them all bigger and better (although they’ve yet to best their Caledonian counterparts in the production of tricksy alcoholic wingers who enjoy a rammy in a pub car park, but let’s not cloud the issue). So it should be with some interest, and perhaps a smidgen of concern to haughty London folk whose clubs are wholly dependent on the whims of Russian businessmen, that a year after the demise of The Pope’s O’Rangers, another of Scotland’s too-big-to-fail giants are in real bother. Heart of Midlothian, one of the grandest institutions in the country and certainly the club with the nicest crest, were put into administration a couple of weeks ago by the financial bobbies. And now, today, they’ve suffered the indignity of being put up for sale on the internet.
The advert certainly goes for the big sell, with mention of the club’s “loyal fan base including c. 10,000 season ticket holders”, a “squad of 22 players, together with a highly skilled, loyal and experienced workforce”, the Hearts “brand and associated goodwill”, and the freehold to Tynecastle Stadium, which may or may not make it easier to bulldoze. The Fiver initially assumed Irvine Welsh, Andy Murray or The Proclaimers had been fannying around half-cut on eBay, and this was some sort of jolly joke authored by a chortling online Hibee. It couldn’t actually be true, could it? So we did what old-school journalists used to do. We dusted down our raincoat, popped on a homburg, wedged a card with PRESS written on it into the brim, took a big slug of whisky, gave our secretary a saucy slap on the bum – he really wasn’t happy about it – and went out into the real world to find out what was going on.
OK, we made one phone call. But we did find out that it is indeed a kosher advertisement, albeit not one specifically placed by the administrators. Turns out BDO, the bean counters who are desperate to hawk Hearts by the deadline they set next Friday, put an advert in the altogether more respectable Financial Times last week sometime, and if you do that you get a free listing on BusinessesForSale.com, gratis, albeit not immediately it would seem. “There really is nothing sinister in it,” sighed a spokesperson for BDO, who the Fiver sensed had quite a few better things to do with his time than talk through the small print of a free ad with a football email suffering from cognitive issues, but was very kind and patient nonetheless. “We placed the FT ad to make sure everyone knows Hearts is for sale. It’s just a marketing tool, to ensure anyone interested knows about it.”
Touch wood, but it seems the ploy may be working, because by all accounts there are “three or four parties” who are “seriously interested” in buying the club, including a fans consortium willing to link up with other investors. The administrators are also hopeful that the looming deadline will flush out further interest. But other than that, there’s likely to be little to report until all the bids are confirmed and in, at the end of next week. With this in mind, the chap from BDO gave the Fiver a little bit of journalistic advice. “Of course, the problem with the administration process,” he said, “is that it isn’t quick or instant. So when there’s a slight gap in the information, people just make it up.” So that’s where the Fiver’s been going wrong all this time! Come back on Monday, then, when we’ll have the latest on the £74bn rescue package being put together by a consortium headed up by Barack Obama, Edward Snowden and Fish from Marillion.
Live on Big Website: David Moyes is saying some things as Man Utd manager, including that Wayne Rooney, unlike Hearts, is not for sale
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“He judged a person and a context without knowing anything about the people he should have dealt with. I never thought of him as an interesting person from a football perspective. We never spoke the same language. And I’m not talking about Italian, Spanish or English. His past at Barcelona? I think he was coming from an airline. I’ve been in football since I was 13 and I had never heard anything about [Roberto] Soriano” – Roberto Mancini clocks up a creditable 52 days in the Fiver’s just-now-invented-for-the-purpose-of-this-quote-of-the-day world biting-your-tongue championships.
FIVER LETTERS
“Regarding Liverpool’s new third kit, which ‘strengthens the club’s fashion heritage’. How fitting then, given Liverpool’s unique sartorial legacy, that it resembles a shellsuit top circa 1992″ – Mike Hopkin.
“My kids finish (primary) school each day at 3pm, and generally the Fiver appears in my inbox around 2 hours later. Coincidence? Surely. However, today the school closed at 12.30pm as it’s the start of the school summer holidays up here in Scotland (the definition of summer being “still cold wet and miserable, but slightly lighter for longer”). In any case, as usual the Fiver pops up in my inbox two hours after school’s out. Coincidence? I think not. This also goes a long way to explaining the schoolboy journalism you subject us to each day” – Steven Lawson.
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BITS AND BOBS
Paulinho will complete his £17m move to Spurs providing he can cough for the doctor without causing any alarm today.
Pep Guardiola has had a look at his sparkly new Bayern toys and decided the only way to make it seem like he is improving something that isn’t broken is to resort to football hipster speak. “We can play with real strikers and false nines. It also depends on the physical condition of the players as to which system I will choose,” he in-your-face-Jupp Heynckesd.
Burnley have bought Turf Moor back after a successful campaign raised £3.5m. The purchase will save the Clarets £500,000 a year in rent payments, which is roughly what the Fiver has to shell out each year to live in its shed in that there London.
But poor old Coventry City fans face the prospect of a 34-mile hike to Northampton’s Sixfields Stadium to watch their team in League One next season after no agreement was reached for the troubled club to use the great big whopping Ricoh Arena in Coventry. Well done everyone.
And Cameroon’s World Cup qualification has hit the skids after Fifa provisionally suspended the country’s football federation [Fecafoot] “on account of government interference” with the body’s elections. You see, Fifa knows how to do elections properly.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Frank Ribéry pulls off the oldest trick in the book …
STILL WANT MORE?
For once the prospect of an ageing star turn pitching up in the Premier League is actually intriguing, writes Barney Ronay, in this love letter to David Villa.
Like a panicked Scott Parker surrounded by three players and with nowhere to go, the Rumour Mill just keeps on turning. Today: Pepe to Manchester City?
By making a move to a player-coach role Ryan Giggs is putting himself in line for the Big Seat at Old Trafford, reckons Paul Wilson.
And Fifa has effed up matchday at the Maracanã, writes Jack Lang. Bad Fifa.