Aidan Smith: Heat now on Paul Heckingbottom as Craig Levein catches a break in ‘P45 derby’

Hibs Manager Paul Heckingbottom, left, and Hearts boss Craig Levein during the derby. Picture: Ross Parker/SNS

Buttonholed on the train by Hibs fans on a return trip to his native Yorkshire, he was slightly taken aback by their monomania. “They said, ‘You’ve got to beat Hearts’,” he told me in August. “I thought: ‘Really? I’ve come to this club just for that?’”

Yesterday he was  desperate for a win in this frivolously inconsequential pretendy little bagatelle of a football match, but he wasn’t the most desperate man pacing the Easter Road touchline. That was Craig Levein, considered by the expert ghouls of Scottish football to be stranded that bit closer to the trapdoor, possibly by the length of his big toes.

Hearts fans – a good number of them – are in revolt. Hibs fans are possibly experimenting with protest banner design, but keeping the exact wording of the message under wraps for now. On the touchline in the frantic early moments – like the frantic later moments of an Edinburgh derby, only more so – both men stayed calm and mostly out of sight.

Banners? There was one as long as the Famous Five Stand. “Where is the player that would not dare fight for Hibernian?” Shouldn’t it be “who”? There was no time to wonder about that. There was no time for the players on the ball, but Scott Allan found room for a trademark reverse ball and then some dazzling footwork by Ryotaro Meshino, who’d come to this frenzy via Osaka and the Etihad, got his boss out of his seat.

Even revolting Hearts fans might have backed their boss in this one, the so-called P45 derby. Levein is a wily campaigner who’s never dissed the fixture. Indeed he’s supposed to obsess about it. And even Hibs fans still behind Heckingbottom must have been fearful that the Hearts boss would have a cunning plan and a way to win.

On the half-hour mark,  having withstood Hibs’ early flurries, Hearts began to  venture forward. Meshino’s clever feet were prominent and Levein was up again wondering why his man wasn’t awarded a free-kick.

Glenn Whelan was asserting himself in the middle of the park but Heckingbottom was soon applauding more delicious angles from Allan. The odd gem apart, the game was what it was, one between two teams struggling for form. Looked at scientifically, as the Hibs coach likes to do, you might indeed wonder what all the fuss was about.

And then came the breakthrough: a 30-yard rocket from the previously anonymous Stevie Mallan. “Sacked in the morning,” the Hibs fans chanted as the Hearts manager stood forlorn. “Craig Levein – we want you to go,” sang the Hearts fans. “We want you to stay,” the home stands countered.

But where was the player that would not dare fight for Hearts, or their leader? They were all doing it, Uche Ikpeazu forcing corner after corner and plundering an equaliser from one. Hibs flagged, the momentum was with their rivals, and so was the luck with Aaron Hickey’s deflected shot for the winner.

To be fair to Heckingbottom he seems to get the derby now. “Today’s game needs little introduction,” he said in his programme notes. “Calling it a ‘game’ doesn’t really do it justice.” Do we call this a crisis at Easter Road? Do the fans call for his head? The pressure is all on him – and meantime lifted from  Levein’s shoulders – after this latest instalment of a fixture that utterly grips Edinburgh, if not everyone from outside.