Hearts manager faces shaking things up at Tynecastle

JIM JEFFERIES knows that he can't keep harping back to the team he built first time around at Hearts and led to the club's first trophy triumph in more than 40 years.

There's no doubt, though, that he'll be using the "Class of 98" as a template now he's returned to Tynecastle because, make no bones about it, Jefferies moulded an exceptional team over a three-year period.

The outfit Jefferies inherited from Tommy McLean after his move from Brockville in August 1995 relied largely on experience in the shape of players like Henry Smith, Neil Berry, Fraser Wishart, Craig Levein, Dave McPherson, Gary Mackay, Jim Bett, John Colquhoun and, of course, John Robertson.

Youngsters such as Gary Locke, Allan Johnston, Paul Ritchie, Alan McManus and Kevin Thomas had, by the looks of things, become demoralised under McLean after Sandy Clark had done such a good job grooming them for success in his time as manager.

It didn't take Jefferies long to decide change was needed in the Tynecastle dressing-room and, over a period of time, he pieced together a jigsaw that was completed, so to speak, on a glorious sunny day in May 1998 as Hearts beat Rangers 2-1 to lift the Scottish Cup at Parkhead.

His first signing may not have been in the Robbie Keane category but Jefferies brought in Alan Lawrence from Airdrie for a specific reason. He felt his team lacked pace up front and "Nipper" fitted the bill.

Jefferies then went back to Falkirk to sign Steve Fulton and the former Celtic midfielder became a key component in the Hearts engine room over the next three seasons. Fulton was the playmaker and enjoyed a day to remember when he got the captaincy for that Scottish Cup win in the absence of Locke.

Neil Pointon also arrived around the same time and "Disa" – you surely won't struggle to work that one out – proved to be another shrewd capture, the former Everton man doing a splendid job at left-back prior to the emergence of Gary Naysmith.

In truth, the game that proved the catalyst for the other signings that followed over the next year was a Coca-Cola Cup defeat to Dundee on penalties at Dens Park in the middle of September.

He brought in a new keeper, giant Frenchman Gilles Rousset, and, after suffering the ignominy of seeing his beloved Hearts slump to the bottom of the SPL after losing 2-0 at Falkirk, also added Paul Smith, Hans Eskilsson and Pasquale Bruno to his squad. Like Lawrence, former Dunfermline midfielder Smith was a short-term fix, while Eskilsson, the mop-haired Swede, never really recovered from admitting he'd missed a chance in a derby at Easter Road because he'd been put off by the noise.

As for Rousset and Bruno, however, they were to become key men for Jefferies, the likeable Frenchman showing why he'd been capped at senior level earlier in his career and the latter using the experience he'd gained with Juventus and Torino to help Paul Ritchie become one of the best young defenders in the SPL.

Jefferies tells a great story about Bruno. After Hearts had drawn 0-0 away with Red Star Belgrade in the opening round of the Cup-Winners' Cup at the start of the 1996-97 season, he picked out the lively Perica Ognjenovic as the dangerman for the return at Tynecastle. After training on the eve of that game, Jefferies took Bruno aside to say he wanted him to man-mark Ognjenovic but, before he could get beyond saying "I've got a job for you", the Italian said: "Don't worry Jimmy, I know what you want – you want your best player to mark their best player!"

Of all the signings Jefferies made first time around, for many the one that made the biggest difference to Hearts was the capture of Colin Cameron, who turned down Aberdeen for the Gorgie club when he moved from Raith Rovers for a reported 400,000 in April 1996.

The little midfielder gave the impression he ate Duracell batteries for breakfast and there's no doubt that his timely return from injury played a big part in that memorable trophy triumph just over two years later.

After losing to Rangers in what was to prove the first of three Cup Finals between him and Walter Smith, Jefferies got his scalpel out again that summer, the arrival of David Weir and Neil McCann as part of a 1million triple signing that also included Jeremy Goss – the Welsh internationalist failed to settle in Edinburgh and was gone by the end of that season – proving just as significant in the masterplan as the capture of Cameron.

McCann, a Scotland Under-21 star at the time, had been on the verge of joining Austrian side Sturm Graz but Jefferies persuaded him to plump for Tynecastle and, to this day, it's a decision that McCann doesn't regret.

Add in the likes of Thomas Flogel, Stefano Salvatori and, of course, Stephane Adam, the man who scored what proved to be the winning goal at Parkhead, and, over a three-year period, Jefferies had built a side that, in the eyes of the Hearts fans, was a joy to watch.

That's what he'll by trying to achieve this time, too, and you can bet that many of the agents who were involved in helping bring that "Class of 98" together will have red-hot phones between now and the start of next season.