Hearts this season: fairytale and anomaly

Something miraculously beautiful is happening in Scotland now. And no, I am not talking about another lock ness monster sighting. However, the utter rarity and near incredulity of the event have left me with no other parallels. The Scottish Premiership season table this year is a sight to behold, and we should all do that while it lasts. Hearts are outright leading the table by as many as 9 points with an extra game played. Celtic are a distant second, while Rangers are in fourth place. And if anyone thinks I am overreacting, it’s fair to reiterate just how nauseatingly matchless the duopoly in Scottish football is.

Rangers and Celtic are about twenty times wealthier than the league-average and at least six times wealthier than the third richest club in the league. Among them, they have 110 league titles in 129 total seasons. A sweet patch between 1982 and 1985 saw three back-to-back titles going to New Farm rivals Aberdeen and Dundee United. Since then, all of the titles have come to the two Glasgow giants. And before 1982, one has to go back to the 1964/65 season to find a winner not named Celtic or Rangers. That’s 56 titles in the last 60 completed seasons piled up by Old Farm rivals. Given such a stronghold of Rangers and Celtic over the Scottish game, it is natural for me to want to gleefully talk about Hearts’ brilliant season to this point. But that glee will quickly be substituted for angst about such things being astronomically rare statistical anomalies in today’s game.

Hearts are undefeated in the league this season. They have won 9 and drawn twice. They have recently defeated Celtic with a thoroughly commanding performance. They had already defeated Rangers 2-0 at Ibrox Park in mid-September with a composed and confident display. Hearts appear to be on course for a league title after a 66-year wait. Derek McInnes, a man who had already tasted some notable success with Aberdeen and Kilmarnock, was appointed in May, and an already more or less upward trajectory of the club in the last few seasons has seen a meteoric acceleration. Lawrence Shankland, their star forward with 10 goals in 15 matches in all competitions this season, has shaken off his slump of last season to rule the goal-scoring charts of the country.

While Claudio Braga, signed from Norway-based Aalesunds this summer, has 9 in 16. Craig Halkett, after two injury-plagued campaigns, has become a cornerstone in his side’s defence. In the Edinburgh derby between Hearts and Hibernian, it was Helkett winning the match for his side with a back-post finish during injury time. Australian Defensive Midfielder Cameron Devlin has been an integral player in the midfield. Hearts have recently become a majority fan-owned football club, the largest of its kind in the British Isles, and the fans have total control over the shares, which come with voting rights. However, they have also been part-owned (specifically, 29% of the club) by Tony Bloom, the often-celebrated owner of Brighton, who holds considerable shares in as many as four football clubs. Tony Bloom backed clubs known for their data-driven transfer approach, which is required for a sustained challenge to the status quo. Right now, Hearts are doing just that, and Bloom had openly claimed that Hearts have “a very good chance of at least being second.”

You know things are bad when this qualified piece of comment makes headline as a “bullish” endorsement of the club’s title whispers. Hearts are head and shoulders above the rest in the league this season after a third of the regular season has been played out. Still, such is the gravity of the big two that, despite both having been marred by ill-judged boardroom decisions and sub-par pitch performance, a second-place finish being a good chance for Hearts this season is being branded as a bold assertion that the manager himself has distanced himself from explicitly. This is the part that makes narrative resemble less of a fairytale and more of a sigh-filled monologue. Football is and should be a skill game.

While chance has always been a part of the proceedings, never in history have we seen clubs needing to literally wait for the astronomically rare event of the status quo faltering together to have any notable chance of winning. David never beats Goliath these days. If they are lucky, they get once-in-a-better-part-of-a-century chances to steal a peek into the mirror while sneakily wearing the crown as Goliath falls asleep. The crown returns to him as soon as he wakes up, and the fleeting glimpse David caught of himself decked in gold for a precious moment is consigned forever to history, drenched in copious amounts of nostalgia and a consensus that it had all been one giant aberration.