Hearts 'agonisingly close' to possibility of winning league
[BBC] In a world of modern technology - where smart watches track your steps, heart rate and more - any Jambos that own one will find the past few weeks make for some interesting reading. At the Dundee game the other weekend, my watch pinged an alert telling me I was in a "stressful period" and needed to calm down. I'm pretty sure the 19,000 other Hearts fans at Tynecastle got a similar message, because we're now just seven games away from the agonisingly close possibility of winning the Scottish Premiership.
I can't even bear thinking about it; I'm sure Derek McInnes and the team will be a lot more chilled than the supporters. As boring as it is, we can only take each game as it comes - and Livingston away on Sunday is the biggest away fixture for a generation. The fact we'll be taking more than 7,000 supporters to the Spaghettihad/Parmesan des Princes (or whatever it's known as these days) is an absolute testament to the job McInnes and the players have done, with Jambos fully behind the team right now.
It's fitting the game is played on Easter Sunday, because Hearts are on a journey to resurrect the reputation of Scottish football and shed the Old Firm's duopoly that has dominated the league for the past four decades. Whenever I speak to football supporters at work from the rest of the UK and beyond, everyone wants us to do it. I've never spoken about Hearts so much in the past six months while we've been top of the league in my world of financial services - and this story really resonates with people.
This is a club owned by its supporters - who have donated more than £20m - after it was nearly lost to administration. We've played in the second tier twice in the past 11 years and we last won Scotland's top flight 66 years ago. We have had our downs and hopefully it's our time to experience some highs.
All that matters on Sunday is making the short trip back along the M8 with three points; it doesn't matter how we get them. There's a bit of a curse we'll need to break with the TV company covering the match, too - we've failed to win our past four games shown on that channel. I've stopped trying to give Del advice on tactics - he clearly knows better than me.