Scott Brown starts after all. As predicted. Soro drops out to make way for the captain.
Loyalty to friends and to sentiment has won out.
But David Turnbull does start, and with Ryan Christie in the team playing wide right. That makes a surface kind of sense.
It is just like Lennon to split the difference on this; I had a feeling he would do something like that. Christie playing wide right means we are, at least, spared the horror of watching him toil as a striker. He and Elyounoussi will patrol the wide areas.
In picking McGregor, Turnbull and Brown we have opted to play Edouard up front alone.
We’re never going to learn not to do that it seems. We spent big money on a second striker this summer just to bench him.
Ajer plays at right back.
It’s another square peg shoehorned into a round hole, so typical of the current management team it makes you despair, but actually he’s done well there, as well as anybody else has anyway. Duffy and Jullien play in the middle … with Taylor on the left which some will regard as a bit of a surprise.
But he’s a better crosser of the ball.
Hazard starts in goal. For a major cup final.
Whilst we have a £5 million goalkeeper sitting on the bench and Peter Lawwell is telling supporters organisations that, yes, we will go back in for Fraser Forster on loan in January. Which means of course that we’re writing off completely now the player we paid an absolute fortune for in the last window.
If this is true and Barkas turns out to be a multi-million-pound waste of a jersey, then somebody ought to lose their job over it. It’s time that failures like this resulted in consequences for other than our bank balance.
Yet I am glad to see the kid in goal today; he’s done very little wrong in the last couple of games, and if he gets an extended run maybe we’ll pull back from the lunacy of trying to “tempt” Forster back to the club again, by offering to resurrect his career for the third time.
Overall, it’s the team most of us expected and the formation we all knew it would be.
It would be good to think it had enough about it that we could dominate this game from early … I hope we do. I hope the team starts at a hundred miles an hour and rolls over Hearts before they can find their feet. As I said earlier today, these players owe us big time.
See you on the other side of history, friends.
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