After a night to forget, Paulo Sergio must face the cold light of day

PERHAPS understandably, there was no press access at Hearts yesterday. Paulo Sergio and his players were still picking themselves up off the floor after one of the most comprehensive defeats surely any of them had suffered since the school playground.

It was a case of back to the drawing board for Sergio, who, after the 5-0 defeat to Tottenham Hostpur, returned home with the noble intention of watching a DVD of last Sunday's match between Kilmarnock and Hibernian.

Hearts travel to face the in-form Rugby Park side tomorrow. However, as good as Kenny Shiels' side were that afternoon, it still must have felt like quite a comedown for Sergio. The Scottish Premier League was shown up for what it is on Thursday night.

Fair play to the Hearts manager for having the stomach to immediately sit down and watch the re-run of Kilmarnock's victory.

Even Harry Redknapp, the diplomatic Spurs manager, might have passed on the invitation to join him. He had other plans. "'Arry, 'Arry, Give us a wave!" fans chorused as Redknapp exited the temporary media suite at Tynecastle on Thursday night, where he had startled those present by revealing he watched Scottish football on television at every opportunity when at home in Bournemouth.

"'Arry, 'Arry, give us a lager, more like," he quipped back at the vocal contingent of Hearts fans who had gathered at the bottom of the stairs.

Redknapp was as polite as he could be following his side's straightforward victory. However, he knew he could not have been taken seriously unless he threw in a few brutal truths. "All the great clubs, all the great players when I was young, it's changed an awful lot now," he lamented. "There's not many great Scottish players around in all honesty."

There was one. Dave Mackay was enjoying Hearts' hospitality next door, no doubt buoyed by the reception he was afforded by home and away fans alike, but also slightly saddened by the spectacle he had witnessed.

He was once asked which team did he feel would have won in a match between the Hearts and Spurs sides he played with. It says something that once this question even had to be posed.

Mackay chose Spurs, but added that it had taken time for the White Hart Lane club to build a side he felt would have been equipped to beat his favoured team from up the road. How times have changed, how the odds have been stacked against Scottish sides who seek to do what their predecessors once did, and give teams from the top tier in England a game.

Comparing the turnovers of both Hearts and Spurs is a sobering business. The Tynecastle club's is 8 million, while Spurs generate 120m. Then it comes to the worth of their respective squads, the Edinburgh team's value of 10m compared with the startling 190m of the Londoners.But, even having taken this financial chasm on board, there's no doubt that Hearts sold themselves short on Thursday night, when they froze in the glare of floodlights and under the gaze of the television cameras.

Spurs toyed with them for the first three minutes before quickly plunging the first knife in.

Immediately after gamely engaging with reporters who hoped to discover what had gone wrong, Sergio then had to turn his attention to rather more mundane matters. The switch to questions about Kilmarnock provided the evening with a surreal twist.

You can imagine Sergio asking questions of himself as he sat in front of the television on his return home. His players had let him down in the first half as they allowed Spurs space to roam where they pleased, that much was clear.

But could he have done anything more?

If he was being honest with himself then the answer had to be yes. However, who in their right mind believed a manager who had met his own players for the first time just a fortnight earlier could know them well enough to think about halting a side as slick as Spurs?

"I learned about my players today," Sergio said, when this weekend's match became the theme of a press conference that had turned into yet another inquest into the state of Scottish football. "I learn about them every day. Like I said before, I'm having a pre-season in competition, so every day I am learning about them."

"I'm seeing positive things in every one of them and I'm seeing negative things too. It's my job to pick those negative things and show to them what they are doing wrong to improve individually and collectively our team. I think they reacted in the second half.

"Even if you can't win, if you work hard you don't lose soft goals. If you try to work together with good aggression on our defensive actions, you can finish the game without conceding any goals. But the way we did it (on Thursday], it's impossible."

A popular refrain since the full-time whistle was heard against Spurs has been: "A Jim Jefferies side would never have allowed that to happen". It's possible that Jefferies himself might have come to this conclusion as he watched the action unfold at home. Certainly, the erstwhile Hearts manager might have thought twice about fielding a patently unfit Andy Webster, or playing two lightweight wingers in the shape of Andrew Driver and David Templeton. If Driver has any ambitions to play English Premier League football then Thursday must have been a particularly cheerless experience for him.

Before the clash with Spurs, Driver would have been most people's choice when asked to name a player most likely to thrive in England's top league if given an opportunity. He was exposed for his physical shortcomings as well as technical, though he was not alone.

The normal criteria used to establish whether a team has been out-classed or not is to wonder whether any of the players would have got a game for the victors.Judging from Thursday, not a single Hearts player would have got anywhere near the Spurs squad. That is the harshest truth of all.