The battle of Marbella sounds like much ado about nothing compared to one pre-season trip with the Jambos.
I'll get to the free-for-all friendly against Almeria shortly but first a stroll down memory lane which became a story of balls on toast and spitting in your pasta. Jim Jefferies used to take us to Il Ciocco every year, it was a training camp high up in the Italian mountains and it was also used by Rangers.
For an entire week we had to run up hills and do altitude training and it was horrendous, I was possibly the only player who actually enjoyed it. At the end of the week we played a bounce game against a team which was made up from the waiters who worked at the hotel and guys from the local amateur side. Every year without fail it would end up in a rammy. The trigger would be one of their players not liking one of our tackles or vice versa and it would all kick-off.
We had a Spanish player called Suso Santana, he'd taken exception to one particular challenge and called a waiter a 'son of a ****'. Cue absolute bedlam. Suso was Spanish but clearly the offended party spoke the language and it was a free for all.
The guy took great offence because he was saying something uncomplimentary about his mum and it was all hands to the pump. It was absolute anarchy and all of the boys were piling in and I remember watching Jefferies, his assistant Billy Brown and Gary Locke just standing at the side of the pitch as the fight escalated.
These things happen all of the time in football but maybe not to the extent that it's a full blown rammy, although there's often handbags coming out on these occasions. These games can be dangerous as there's always someone who doesn't like a particular tackle and when there's an issue with the language barrier then it can all start to escalate.
That's possibly what happened in the game against Almeria. I've never been involved in a game where it's actually been abandoned as it's usually a case the offending player is removed as was the case with Suso, who was taken straight off to calm things. Clearly Robbie Neilson felt this game had reached a stage where it had gone too far and there was a risk of players being injured but it's a judgement call.
I laughed when I heard what happened as it brought back memories of Suso and having to tell him about the waiter's revenge which was awaiting him back at the hotel. I told him they would be rubbing the toast on their ba*** and spitting in his pasta so I think he went on a diet for the final few days before we returned home.
Looking back I believe Jefferies didn't have a problem with the game erupting into chaos. There would have been a side to him that quite enjoyed it and liked the fact there was a chance things would kick-off.
He wanted to use it to galvanise the team spirit, he wanted to see who would be involved, who would be weighing in to help their team-mate and who wasn't. He wanted to see if his team had one another's backs.
As crazy as it sounds, after a game like the one Hearts have just had and what we experienced, it can end up bringing the squad closer together. Hearts may look at this game as a turning point for the season if they do achieve things this season and I'm sure the boys who have been at the World Cup would have been the first on the phone to find out what happened. Some of them will even be wishing they'd been there to help out their mates.
Make no mistake, these incidents do galvanise a squad and we may see that with Hearts in the coming weeks, starting with the game looming against Kilmarnock. When something happens when everyone's in it together, there's something crazy good about it. I was critical of the last display against Killie, Hearts don't have a good record against them and they were poor but Neilson needs to make sure his players get back and hit the ground running after finishing before the start of the World Cup on a decent run of form. It's vital that it continues.
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