You grow out of a lot of things as the years pass and your priorities change, but the child-like buzz you get from that first home game of a new season is something I don’t think will ever disappear as I get older. Just as well really, because by full-time on Sunday, I felt I had aged a few decades after what proved to be a mentally draining return to Tynecastle.
After slow starts in Perth and Trondheim, there was even greater demand for the players to start Sunday’s game firing on all cylinders, though going by the first half, someone had lost the car keys. You typically look for a bit of verve and energy from the first home match of the season, but Sunday very quickly descended into the sort of frustrating, attritional fare you’d expect to see in a mid-season fixture played in the depths of winter. Hearts fans could well have been forgiven for wondering if they’d travelled back in time by six months.
We’ve all seen goalless draws where no matter how many crosses you put into the box, no matter how many shots you pepper the goal with, for some reason it just doesn’t happen for you on the day: the keeper has the game of his life; the centre backs block everything; the woodwork seems a few centimetres thicker. When you can point to the barrage of chances created, those results - though no less frustrating - are easier to mitigate. However, a goalless draw in which you mustered just one shot on target, four less than the visitors, and half as many efforts as them in total, is harder to swallow.
To give Kilmarnock credit, they look a well-drilled side under Derek McInnes, they defended diligently on the day and they’ll do a similar job on other teams this season, but they’re not the first - and certainly won’t be the last - team to set up like that at Tynecastle. Eventually, Hearts will have to find a way to break these teams down instead of simply passing themselves and the rest of us into a coma.
Whether that was because the players are still getting up to speed with competitive football or something more deeply, systemically wrong with how we were set up, is hard to call at such an early stage of the campaign.
As much as it’s something we have to get used to if we want European football to become a regular appointment on our calendar, the short turnaround between Thursday’s trip to Norway and the return to league action will undoubtedly have had some bearing this early in the season. At the same time, it may be that the newer guys need more time to tune into the same frequency as their teammates. It could also be that some of their teammates were considerably below par on the day. Maybe it’s a bit of all three - the scenarios are not mutually exclusive.
When Lawrence Shankland is on his game, he can bring the best out of those around him, but on Sunday he produced arguably his worst performance in a maroon shirt and spent a good chunk of the afternoon teetering on the brink of a red card as his frustrations came to the fore.
A source of that frustration - and another reason we looked so insipid going forward - may well have been the lack of quick and effective service from midfield, which was forcing him to drop gradually deeper to look for scraps. For all their defensive qualities, neither Peter Haring nor Cammy Devlin is the kind of midfielder Hearts are crying out for just now, one who can move the ball quickly and effectively between the lines. The result is often safe, sideways and stagnant, which only plays into the hands of teams like Killie, who are happy to sit back and let Hearts have the ball until a misplaced ball or heavy touch presents an opportunity to counter.
One glimmer of positivity in that regard was Aidan Denholm, who followed up a positive cameo against Rosenborg with a confident 25-minute performance off the bench. Based on what we’ve seen from him so far, it’s baffling that he was on the verge of being cut loose last season, which is probably a glaring insight into how neglected the youth academy was in danger of becoming under previous management. Granted, he’s still only 19 and the sample size is obviously small, but given our current lack of variety in the middle of the park, there’s no reason he can’t stake a claim for a start in the near future.
Despite our troubles in the final third, another positive to take is that we’ve now registered clean sheets from two league fixtures that - if you were really clutching at straws - have been historically problematic for us. Although Kilmarnock finished the game with far more attempts on goal, that felt like a more damning indictment of our own attacking efforts than anything we did wrong at the back.
Zander Clark had more saves to make than his opposite number, the most notable from Kyle Magennis’ first half header, but the rest tended to be from less threatening long-range efforts. There was also one moment in the first half when Matty Kennedy was put through on goal after a bit of pinball in the middle of the park, but even that felt like one of those freak moments that comes about thanks to a lucky ricochet, as opposed to any sort of clever, incisive build-up.
Even our defending from set pieces seemed solid, which was just as well given the number of free-kicks Killie were getting around our 18-yard box. Considering our unenviable recent track record in that department and how frustrating the game was becoming, conceding a winning goal in that fashion would have been a very typically Hearts thing to do, but in general we defended our box with a lot more competence than we’ve been known to.
Ultimately, it was a tired performance from start to finish and far from the aggressive, attacking play we were expecting from a Steven Naismith side. Regardless of how early it is in the season or how quick the turnaround is, that will need to change when Rosenborg pitch up in Gorgie on Thursday night if there’s to be any hope of swinging this European tie in our favour.