Steven Naismith has used the media to hit back at Scott Brown, with a series of absolutely bogus claims which don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny and are simply being deployed as a smoke screen in front of the almost inevitable SFA charges for violent conduct.
Naismith’s comments are, naturally, getting plenty of media coverage.
The same papers, including The Daily Record, feigned ignorance as to what Brown was so angry about at full-time.
This is a player who was elbowed in the face twice and stamped on whilst he was on the deck, to say nothing for a game full of needles and niggles directed at him.
How much of it did Brown respond to on the pitch itself? None of it. The hacks are bitter and angry but they cannot point to a single time that our captain responded negatively whilst the game was in progress. He was what he’s always been; a model professional.
Now the hacks – with a lead from the Hearts player guiltiest of those vicious acts – are picking away at Scott’s reaction once the whistle blew and claiming it shows that he and our team were feeling the pressure. If that’s true, why did it take the winning penalty – our winning penalty – for that pressure to explode?
Why would Brown have been feeling pressure at the moment after the game had been won and the legacy of this team secured?
It is garbage. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny at all.
Naismith has accused Brown of trying to “enforce and intimidate” rival players.
But it was Brown himself who got battered all over the pitch at the weekend and I would suggest that it was Naismith and his team-mates who attempted the intimidation.
What bothers them of course is that Brown refuses to be intimidated and just got on with the game.
Let me tell you; I thought it was one of Brown’s best performances in a long, long time. I have a few concerns about it, which I’ll talk about later, but overall he was excellent and especially in how he kept his composure when so many Hearts players were losing theirs.
This was the mark of a captain, a leader.
Naismith wore the armband for Hearts and snarked and fought and bit and clawed his way through the match in which another ref, on another day, against another opponent, would have shown him a red card.
That was his contribution to his own team’s cause, to come close to blowing it up.
Brown showed him how it was done.
No wonder he and others are bitter over it.
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