It was hard not to smile inside Tynecastle on Saturday evening when hearing Hearts boss Wouter Vrancken speak about the philosophy behind his side’s 5-0 battering of St Mirren.
Hard not to hope that he builds on the progress made there under a different regime last season and goes on to become a success. Hard not to listen and take your own mind back to days when playing football was every bit as much fun as watching the Belgian’s improving squad throw off the shackles and dish out this tonking in technicolour.
‘For the players, we try to play a football that, when you were a little boy, when you started playing football on the street, you played football to score goals at that moment. Not to stay behind in front of your goal and prevent the goals,’ he said.
‘You want to score goals because this feeling that you get then is the nicest feeling that you have in football.’
Maintaining that sense of freedom in the high-stakes, data-driven, ultra-coached professional game is quite some statement of intent. Seeing players who are quite clearly enjoying their football in that difficult environment is simply a joy.
Calvin Miller, all energy and enthusiasm, looks like he is having a ball. Over on the left flank, there is little more left to be said about the form and the general body language of the fabulously exciting Josh McPake.
A delighted Wouter Vrancken celebrates with his players after the 5-0 win against St Mirren
Vrancken has given Hearts winger Josh McPake the freedom to play with a smile on his face
Calvin Miller scores the first of his two penalties as Hearts coast to victory at Tynecastle
You hear so many coaches talk about the need to enjoy football and of players expressing themselves. The reality is so often different, though.
From those days charging around like headless chickens in the chaos of the local swingpark or any available patch of concrete, things change when things get organised. When boys – and girls – find themselves barely touching the ball and not being allowed to cross the halfway line with their school team because they have to concentrate on playing offside.
Or when they go up a level and have parents screaming at them from the touchlines like banshees on Spice. Or when senior clubs start sniffing around and inviting them into the dog-eat-dog world that exists under their umbrellas.
By the time that select few, that tiny percentage, who rise through the ranks actually get to senior football, so much of the happiness of their childhood years has been beaten out of them. Football becomes just a job. And it does happen.
In nearly 40 years of reporting on football, yours truly has encountered a number of players who don’t really have any great love left for what they do. Who aren’t terribly interested in it.
Just look at so many of the interviews we all sit through and fall asleep over. Dead eyes, monotone voices, the ‘don’t get too high, don’t get too low’ mantra. People scared to say anything. Show anything.
Setting out a blueprint to have players going about the game the way they did when they were kids is quite something in this day and age.
We gave Vrancken a little bit of grief here earlier in the season when he tried to explain away the Champions League hosing from Sturm Graz by stating that the Austrians had been preparing for weeks in advance of his team getting back into training. It was a load of tosh.
However, we’re now quite some way on from that with the 47-year-old. He’s got his feet under the table at Hearts. The punters seem happy with him, and why wouldn’t they be?
His team are fun to watch. There’s a real sense of risk and reward about what he’s doing.
Even on Saturday, they could have scored ten goals but still coughed up two great opportunities in the second 45 that Luke Thomas and Calvin Ramsay squandered for the visitors.
It looks like Gorgie accepts all that, though. They like what they are seeing from a team that is only really starting to come together. And having the pleasure of watching McPake carry on his own personal fairy story should be a highlight.
The 25-year-old just exudes confidence right now. It’s so lovely to witness. The only problem is that it is just so difficult to rationalise how his story actually happened. How he had to fall so far that he ended up at Stirling Albion in League One.
How he could never get into the St Johnstone team the last time they were in the Premiership. How the McDiarmid Park side were ready to get shot of him in January 2025 and couldn’t find anyone interested.
The common narrative is that the penny just dropped with McPake before the promotion season with Saints that changed his entire direction of travel. That just seems too simple. Too cut-and-dried.
It can’t just be about him, can it? There must be more to it than that.
One of the great treasures about McPake is his eagerness to take opponents on, beat a man, take a shot. How many players like that does Scottish football produce these days? Not many.
It’s why the national team is desperate to squeeze Ben Gannon-Doak into the line-up, even though he plays next to no club football and needs real work on his end product.
It’s maybe worth considering why there are so few of these maverick, individual talents. Is it something to do with coaching here? Is that something the Scottish Football Association might like to look at in addition to just telling clubs that playing more Under-21 players will be some kind of panacea?
An argument for a different day, perhaps. When he’s in the frame of mind he’s in right now, though, McPake certainly embodies the spirit of the kid just going for it in the playground, trying things out, finding his own solutions, making you laugh with his skill and audacity.
Players like McPake are part of the lore, the tradition, of Scottish football, but they are a rare species. Wingers with that freewheeling spirit of the schoolyard just seem to have disappeared somewhere along the line.
If a coach with the prominence of Vrancken can help more of his contemporaries tap into what made football so special for all of us in the beginning, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
He says goals are the nicest feeling in football. Maybe. But seeing talented people play with abandon and freedom and real, pure, open-hearted relish is a pretty serious rival.
Hearts (4-2-3-1): Reus 7; Altena 7, Fagan-Walcott 7, McCart 7, Milne 8; Ageu 7 (McEntee 57), Mendy 7; Miller 8 (Kerjota 57), Braga 8 (Guendouz 73), McPAKE 9 (Findlay 81); Wilson 7 (Williams 73).
Subs not used: Fulton, Borchgrevink, Magnusson, Mato.
Bookings: Miller, Guendouz.
St Mirren (4-2-3-1): Chapman 4; Ramsay 4 (Fraser 81), Gogic 3, Fieldson 4, John 4; Carr 4 (Donnelly 46), Nsio 4; Mochrie 3 (Thomas 46), Taylor 4 (Young 46), Kabia 4 (Sule 67); Phillips 4.
Subs not used: Tamosevicius, Jackson, Ramos, McEvoy.
Bookings: Mochrie, Gogic.
Referee: Nick Walsh.
Attendance: 18,582.
****ENDS****
