In case you missed it, Hearts are third in the Premiership, beat the champions last weekend, have in their possession the country's top goalscorer (whom we managed very well), and while we did indeed have a positive spell at the start of the second period, that was game management on their part, knowing they had reinforcements for the closing stages when we would - without any bench options - inevitably tire. Their goal was a counterattack and if you go all-out after that there's only going to be one ending: they throw people forward to catch the out-balls and you're screwed.
It's just nasty to say Imrie doesn't trust the guys he's signed or whom he chooses to put on the bench. Again, this is the third-best team in the country. He's set our guys - who are a mix of good Championship players, former top flight players at the end of their careers, and youths - out with a plan, and throwing warm bodies at a plan for the sake of doing so is bad for all concerned. With no forwards on the bench, whom would you have put on with five minutes to go to hold the ball up against Sibbick and whoever the other one was at center-back? Was it:
Jack Bearne, a winger
Lewis McGrattan, a winger and midfielder
Michael Garrity, a midfielder (and a diminutive one at that)
or Sam Murdoch, a goalkeeper?
Remember, everyone was saying Broadfoot was done since he was playing at LL level, and Imrie has - with some admitted road bumps along the way - got both him and Power playing well. Shankland was left in no doubt whom he was up against tonight and said as much in his post-match interview. Will Broadfoot get any recognition for that - again, Shankland is the best striker in the country right now, and will probably go to the Euros? Or will he just get slated for not scoring a last-minute equalizer? In a game where we'd been on the back foot for the majority, except early in the second half, Broadfoot did an admirable job keeping them to relatively few open chances. He deserves credit for this - and so does Imrie for signing and playing him!
Long story short: if Imrie didn't trust Bearne he wouldn't be here, and if he didn't trust McGrattan and Garrity they wouldn't be getting minutes at all. Instead Bearne was signed and the latter two have played plenty, considering their ages. McGrattan has appeared in the vast majority of games this season, and Garrity (two years younger) is being carefully bedded in. They're getting an appropriate amount of football for the time in their careers and this is particularly true when you're up against, again, the third-best team in the country and a legendary Scottish goalkeeper who despite his age deserves to go to the Euros this summer.
Leaving aside certain attention-seeking fuds (I do not count you as one of these) there really does seem to be this idea that Imrie's somehow throwing away wins by refusing to "trust" young players. It's absolutely idiotic. What Imrie knows, as a guy who came relatively late to the senior game, is that sometimes experience is what's needed. Just look at Queen's Park: they thought they could play a bunch of youngsters and have them play it out from the back, and that ended up with relegation form. Now they have a couple of old heads and they look fine, and the young players they have will be better for the experience. It's just not the case that you can go up against Hearts and throw the kids at them and come away with a better outcome than we had tonight, and people need to stop acting as though Imrie's sandbagging us by refusing to make Logan O'Boy captain.
tl;dr: Scottish fans' fetish for putting the kids on is stupid. It's not borne out by the stats or simply by facing the right way at games. Imrie did nothing wrong. We held out own against a team that will send at the very least two players to the Euros in summer and will play in Europe next year, and we did it without our most vital player. There is absolutely zero scope to criticize Imrie for this game and everyone who does so should be hanged in real life.