Gary Mackay: Sergio’s passion and resolve has lifted the club

We’ve given the Hearts players lots of credit over the past few weeks, and justifiably so, but there’s no doubt that all the credit from Saturday’s game goes to Auchinleck Talbot.

The main objective was always to get into the next round and maintain our momentum in terms of results, but it’s fair to say we were heading for a really disastrous result until Gordon Smith popped up with his goal.

Although we never looked in any danger of losing the game, there was very little to write home about from a Hearts point of view. Indeed, arguably the highlight of the day for Hearts was seeing Rudi Skacel go over to commiserate with and lift Fraser Mullen after the young boy had missed the penalty.

Rudi proved he is the type of good professional you need at your club, especially when difficult things are occurring. He’s got a real knowledge of what the club’s about and that gesture spoke volumes about him.

If we’re planning to load the team with youth, then it’s imperative we retain some good solid senior pros like Rudi to aid the transition of these young boys into the first team.

As far as the decision to make so many changes to the team is concerned, the manager obviously felt it was right to freshen the team up with a few untried players and, in hindsight, it was a decision which almost backfired in the form of a disappointing result.

However, Paulo Sergio, pictured below, is the man who is working with the players on a daily basis and he is better placed than any of us to decide what team to pick. It may also have been the case that, given the route we’ve been told the club is going down, he felt Saturday was the ideal time to field some of the young players he feels have a chance of being involved in the first team in the coming weeks, months and years.

Regardless of how the team played, the manager will have found out a lot about some of these players.

On another note, it was reassuring to hear the manager once again speak so well to the press at the tail end of last week. I’ve only met Paulo once but there’s so much to admire about him: his passion, his resolve and the way he seems to have bought into what Hearts as a club are about.

He has no agenda and just seems to really want to do his best by the club. He’s come in at such a difficult time. When we were signing the likes of John Sutton, Jamie Hamill, Mehdi Taouil and Danny Grainger under Jim Jefferies in the summer, no-one could have foreseen that, just six months down the line, we’d be in such a difficult predicament.

It would be hard enough for a British manager to deal with everything that’s happening at Hearts, but here we have a man who had no previous experience of dealing with the day-to-day running of a British club doing an incredibly admirable job in holding everything together.

All the talk’s been of which players will be leaving Hearts but I’m equally concerned about whether we can hang on to our manager.

He is singing from the same hymn sheet as all good-minded Hearts supporters. It seems that, for as long as he is here, he is intent on doing his best to make sure that our proud club remains in existence and for that, all Hearts fans should be extremely grateful to him.