Naismith Promises A Different Hearts Against Celtic And We May Have To Play Without Callum.

Some expected stuff today … and one dark bit of thunder out of a clear sky.

First up, fresh from overseeing a proper doing for his club at Ibrox, Steven Naismith has promised that Hearts will not be quite so weak or gutless against Celtic, and you know what folks? I actually believe him. That was as predictable as the rising of the sun.

Just as many of us knew that he would make damned sure they weren’t leaving Ibrox with anything more impressive than a hard luck story (“We’ll learn from that,” was actually the best he could come up with after the defeat) we knew we’d see a completely different attitude when it was Celtic they were coming up against. There would be no press conference full of praise for our manager and talk about how much Naismith was learning from him.

Sunday is going to be massive, because his team will make it massive. They will contest every 50/50 ball in a way they didn’t last weekend, they will make us fight for every inch we move up the field. There is zero prospect of their collapsing without at least trying to have a go, because this guy wants to beat us far more than he was interested in talking points from his favourite club, under his new daddy. There’s nothing here we didn’t expect to see.

Scottish football is full of ex-Ibrox men and Ibrox sympathisers, but there are only a handful of them I didn’t trust as far as I could throw them when it came to coming up against that side. The Phil Mitchell of Livingston, David Martindale, is one of them. I used to laugh at the idea that Neilson would ever take points from them, and then there’s Derek McInnes.

I said in an earlier piece that McInnes has more professional pride than to have his teams lie down to them, and they lived up to that on Wednesday; they gave them one Hell of a game in total contrast to Naismith, whose side barely registered a shot on target.

The really bad news today is that Callum might not be fit for it as he’s nursing an achilles injury. It only amazes me that in a season of players going out for long spells that it has taken the captain so long to pick up one. He’s like a machine, but even the hardiest tech breaks down if you run it long enough and few players in Europe have played more games.

It is obviously a huge and worrying blow, and not what any of us wanted to hear. They’ll assess him in the next 24 hours, the manager says, but in the end I think we’re strong enough to go there and win regardless. Naismith will obviously not roll over for us, but I wouldn’t expect that from any manager. It’s our job to make their lives hard, not their job to make ours easy.

Without the captain, that’s a tougher prospect again. But this is why you build a squad and between Iwata, O’Riley and Bernardo we have the stuff to get the job done. There are no free rides to be had here, and there never were, not for us anyway.