Quintin Jardine's blog

Alas, Pilmar’s birthday wasn’t rounded off as we’d hoped, not by a five goal margin it wasn’t. There isn’t a single football cliché applicable to Hearts’ situation, not even ‘A mountain to climb’, for none so high exist.

A black night, not only for the Jambos, but for the whole game north of  the border. We are one week away from every Scottish side being eliminated from Europe before the end of August, a circumstance that I will find plain unacceptable if it comes to pass. Uruguay, a nation with a population two thirds that of Scotland, has just won the South American championship, beating the likes of Brazil and Argentina. Instead of commissioning a failed politician to compile a report on the structure of the game which frankly a ten-year-old could have anticipated and summarised on the back two pages of a school jotter, the Scottish Football Dissociation should have sent a highly qualified delegation to look at their developmental structure and determine what we can learn from it. That can still happen, and it should, without delay.