Analysis Corner: Is Hearts title challenge for real?
By Dougie Wright (@dougie_wright)
How far can Hearts go?
At the start of the season, I thought Hearts were in a very poor position.
Jon McLaughlin, arguably the best goalkeeper in Scotland last season, had left for Sunderland.
Things hardly got much better on a personnel front.
Firstly, club captain Christophe Berra was ruled out for seven months after an injury against Celtic.
Then last season’s top scorer Kyle Lafferty was sold to Rangers.
To top it off, manager Craig Levein was out of action from mid-August after a heart scare saw him hospitalised.
Without these four individuals, Hearts would have seriously struggled to make the top six last season.
Yet, despite this apparent adversity, the Tynecastle club have thrived. Five wins out of five marks their best start to a Premiership season since 2006, and this time there’s no Vladimir Romanov related skulduggery to halt it.
Is this sustainable?
This time last season they had conceded 6 goals from 19 shots on target; this season they’ve conceded just 2 from 16. Over the course of the season, you’d usually concede once for every three or four shots on target, so the chances are they will start to concede slightly more soon.
Going forward, they’ve both taken more shots than anyone else and scored more than anyone else. Again, the law of averages says that usually one every nine shots goes in – Hearts are currently scoring one every eight, which is well within the bounds of sustainability.
Five games isn’t a lot to go on, but the signs are encouraging.
The Steven Naismith renaissance
Steven Naismith has been a particular revelation.
Five goals from just thirteen shots is a conversion rate that probably can’t be sustained over the course of the season, but even if he didn’t score a single more goal for Hearts, he would still be worth his ninety minutes on the pitch.
While he still presses any dodgy defenders like he did ten years ago, at 32 years old, he now leads the line particularly well. He knows when to hold up the ball, go for a dribble, or play a first-time pass.
With Uche Ikpeazu proving more than a handful for pretty much every defence he’s played against so far, the Naimsith-Ikpeazu partnership ticks every box you want from your forward line: athletic, intelligent, skilled and aggressive.
Few would have guessed that Naismith would be Scotland’s first choice striker when he arrived back in Edinburgh this summer, but even fewer are complaining now that he is.
Recruitment
Ikpeazu and Naismith may be standouts so far, but Hearts’ recruitment this summer has been generally excellent.
Zlamal has only let in two goals in five games, both due to freak defensive lapses.
Peter Haring has clicked superbly alongside John Souttar in defence, and has arguably turned Hearts into the league’s biggest threat from set pieces. The Austrian centre half finds space in the box comfortably and is fairly dominant in the air.
Olly Lee, Jake Mulraney and Steven Maclean have all surprised with their immediate effect on the team. With Craig Wighton and Sean Clare near certain to become important first team members too, you feel as though Hearts have got brilliant value from their summer rebuild.
Don’t be like Aberdeen
While the summer signings have propelled Hearts further than they would have imagined, there is a recent precedent that should make Jambos cautious.
Back in 2015, Aberdeen won their first eight games in a row and were five points clear come the end of September.
With the run including a 2-1 victory over Celtic, there was a legitimate case that Aberdeen could become the first non-Glasgow based champions since their 1985 triumph.
Yet, one point in their next five games saw both Celtic and Hearts leapfrog the Pittodrie side, as their title challenge collapsed just as it begun.
This was a classic case of Aberdeen figuring out a tactic that worked, then not adapting it. Their 4-2-3-1 formation blew teams away early in the season who perhaps underestimated what new signings Graeme Shinnie and Daniel Ward would bring to the team.
Yet after these eight games, teams noticed that Aberdeen had a fairly static style of play and were pretty vulnerable defending set pieces. As such, teams began to adapt their game specifically for games against Aberdeen.
When St Johnstone won 5-1 at Pittodrie, it was clear that McInnes’ initially successful tactics had been found out.
As Hearts continue to win games, teams will pay more and more attention to their weaknesses. Earlier I mentioned the effectiveness of Peter Haring at set pieces – from now on, any manager with access to Hearts’ past games will know not to give him a spare inch in the penalty box.
So how far can this Hearts side go?
Usually at this stage of the season when a team goes on a run of form, it’s either due to a) easy fixtures or b) a reliance on one star player.
The first point is negated when you consider they’ve already beaten Celtic and won away at two of the league’s toughest away fixtures: Kilmarnock and Motherwell.
As for the second point, they’ve already lost their captain and top scorer and they’ve been absolutely fine.
Five games is way too early to call them contenders, but October will bring challenges from Aberdeen, Rangers and Hibs. If they’re still comfortably at the top of the league at that point, you’d have to naïve to think they won’t be Celtic’s biggest threat to eight in a row.
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