Football can be a brutal world but Craig Wighton deserved more respect from Hearts

Sometimes you read an interview which really lands. That was the case with my colleague Barry Anderson’s piece with the soon to be former Hearts midfielder Lewis Moore earlier this week.
Former Hearts striker Craig Wighton (left) competes with Arbroath's Ricky Little in his penultimate appearance for the club in December  (Photo by Paul Devlin / SNS Group)Former Hearts striker Craig Wighton (left) competes with Arbroath's Ricky Little in his penultimate appearance for the club in December  (Photo by Paul Devlin / SNS Group)
Former Hearts striker Craig Wighton (left) competes with Arbroath's Ricky Little in his penultimate appearance for the club in December (Photo by Paul Devlin / SNS Group)

It struck a chord because I remember interviewing Moore before the last match of last season. Not that we knew it was the last match of last season at the time, of course. The young Moore gushed about being back in the team under Daniel Stendel with the prospect of a new contract to come.

His story felt all the more triumphant because his father, Michael, had died at the start of the previous summer and he was dedicating everything he did to him.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Fate then intervened. Hearts lost 1-0 to St Mirren. A pandemic swept in, the season was curtailed. Hearts were relegated, Stendel left, and Moore has featured just once since despite being given a new two-year-contract.

Now on loan at Arbroath, he’s been told there’s no future for him at Tynecastle. It seemed a little brutal although Hearts’ part in helping land the 22-year-old Moore a loan deal at Gayfield must be acknowledged. I said as much on Twitter. The post brought a fair and reasoned response from James Stephens. “Football is a brutal sport,” he wrote. “But equally it doesn’t owe anyone anything.”

True to an extent. My point was more the manner of the severing of ties, and the fact Moore, in the interview, revealed he learned he was being moved on from a newspaper rather than face-to-face, from his manager, the way we’d all like to think it would and surely should happen.

Footballers are well paid but they are, especially the younger ones, entitled to expect this, no? It seems a particularly urgent consideration during lockdown when mental health welfare has become such an issue.

Football not owing anything to anyone is perhaps not quite true either. Surely Hearts owed Craig Wighton more than a phone call to his agent to tell him to find his client another club. The player himself was not informed until later.

It can be argued they owe him more than dumping him with the Under-18s to train. After all, it’s just weeks since he was deemed good enough to be a first-team regular, a matter of months since he scored in a Scottish Cup semi-final win v Hibs.

Was yesterday’s decision to allow him to sign on-loan for Dunfermline - he was previously told he could not move to Championship rivals Dundee, Raith Rovers or Dunfermline – made out of consideration for his own welfare or was it a more straightforward business decision?

Someone, somewhere realised it was nonsensical to keep paying all his wages while he kicked his heels until the end of the season, when a two-year deal at East End Park kicks in.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

If they felt he was good enough to pose such a threat, why ostracise him in the first place? It isn’t just Hearts, of course. It happens elsewhere, although it was refreshing to note that, even amid the club’s current troubles, Neil Lennon has permitted a clearly struggling Hatem Abd Elhamed to return to his Israel homeland with Celtic taking a hit of around £800,000 in the process. Even in the brutal world of professional sport, compassion is possible.

A message from the Editor:Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by Coronavirus impacts our advertisers.If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription - https://www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

Comments

 0 comments

Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.