Hearts: The curious similarities between class of 98/99 and present day after 27 matches - featuring Mo Berthe, Colin Cameron and great escape

If Hearts are to get themselves safe, they’re going to have to battle like it’s 1999.

After 27 games of their Premiership campaign, they languish two points adrift at the foot of the table (albeit with a game in hand) and are staring at the catastrophic prospect of being relegated with an expensively-assembled team which was widely expected to be competing for a European place. Their grim plight is exacerbated by the knowledge that they have won only one of their last 15 league games.

While reasons for optimism are thin on the ground for Hearts supporters, a source of hope for the months ahead can be found in recalling the way the 1998/99 season panned out for their team.

Some 21 years ago, Jim Jefferies’ star-studded side, who had finished third and won the Scottish Cup in the previous season, somehow found themselves in a remarkably similar predicament to that in which Daniel Stendel’s side are presently engulfed.

With 27 games of that campaign having elapsed, Hearts were three points adrift of Dunfermline Athletic at the foot of the ten-team Premier Division with a game in hand. After an incredible winless run in which they took just two points from a possible 33 through a grim mid-winter, the likes of Gilles Rousset, Dave McPherson, Paul Ritchie, David Weir, Gary Naysmith, Steve Fulton, Stephane Adam, Stefano Salvatori and Thomas Flogel were enduring the ignominy of sitting rock-bottom of the league less than a year after becoming club legends.

Of the side that had started the 1998 cup final victory over Rangers at Celtic Park, only Neil McCann had departed Tynecastle, while veterans like John Robertson and Neil Pointon also moved on. With highly-regarded players like Rab McKinnon, Steven Pressley, Darren Jackson, Juanjo, Gary McSwegan and Vincent Guerin added to the mix, Hearts, in theory, should have been even stronger than they were in that history-making 1997/98 campaign. Yet here they were seemingly unable to buy a win and with only nine games left to prevent themselves going from heroes to zeroes.

Mercifully for all concerned, the 27th game of the season - a 2-0 defeat to Dundee at Dens Park in which the infamous Frenchman Mo Berthe, who signed on loan from Bournemouth, made his one and only appearance for the club - proved to be the nadir for Hearts. Thereafter, Hearts took 18 points from their closing nine fixtures and climbed to sixth by the conclusion of the campaign.

“It’s a tough one to pinpoint why we found ourselves in that position,” defender Ritchie told the Evening News. “People move on and small pieces in the puzzle change. That can sometimes be all it takes. After winning the cup, we tried to strengthen by bringing in quality players but the mixture and the balance just wasn’t right. Once you lose a few games, it’s difficult to get out of it, especially when you’re a team not used to being in a battle. That 98 team had been used to winning so when you suddenly start losing it becomes a real test of character. It was a major shock to be in that position. It was a real jolt to the system for us.”

In a further similarity to the current situation at Hearts, the 98/99 team was badly hindered by the long-term loss to injury of their most important player. Just as captain Steven Naismith has missed the majority of this campaign and is still in the process of trying to get back to peak form and fitness, Colin Cameron - the midfield driving force of the Hearts side of the late 1990s - was absent until February of the relegation-battling season as he was plagued by an obscure pelvic problem which, bizarrely, was eventually cured by a French dentist.

Cameron’s return to action, incidentally, came in the first match after centre-back Weir had been sold to Everton. “We missed wee Mickey for a big part of that season and the boost we got from him coming back into the team was, I think, the thing that turned the corner for us,” recalled Ritchie. “I don’t know if Steven Naismith is 100 per cent fit yet but hopefully he can be the type of character like wee Mickey was for us that can get the Hearts boys together and get them grinding out results.”

Cameron started ten games in the closing months of the campaign and chipped in with six goals as Hearts came to life when it mattered most. The former Raith Rovers playmaker’s first goal came in a rot-stopping, tide-turning 3-1 win away to Dundee United on a Tuesday night in early April when he scored an excellent solo goal after a McSwegan double had cancelled out Billy Dodds’ opened. That victory lifted Hearts off the bottom and from that point on, they never looked back.

They clocked up four more convincing wins: 4-0 away to Motherwell, 2-0 at home to Dunfermline, 4-1 at home to United and 5-2 away to Aberdeen on the final day, with Cameron scoring in all of those matches. There was also a creditable goalless draw at Ibrox in the penultimate away fixture of the season. Stendel’s Hearts look desperately in need of their own landscape-altering moment.

“That win at Tannadice turned things for us in 1999 and I thought the win over Rangers last month would have been the result that turned it for the current team,” said Ritchie. “Even before that, they’d done well against Aberdeen and Airdrie in the cup. But ever since the Rangers game, it just seems to have gone back to where it was before.”

The classy team of late 90s ultimately showed they had the resolve to fend off the threat of impending calamity; it remains to be seen if the 2020 team - featuring no less than five current internationalists - can conjure a similar spirit over the course of the next three critical months.

“We also had a strong management team to help us through it because Jim and Billy Brown had been involved in situations like that with previous teams,” said Ritchie. “They were taskmasters and they made sure we dug ourselves out of the quagmire. Everybody said back then we were too good to go down, but no team’s ever too good to go down. For teams like Hearts, who don’t have loads of money, it comes in waves. You embrace the good times when they come, but when the bad times come you’ve got to be willing to roll the sleeves up. This Hearts team have got the players, they’ve got the quality - now the question is do they have the hunger, the fight and the desire to get themselves out of the trouble they’re in?”