George Russell tops charts in first practice for Austrian Grand Prix
Russell took his first win of the season last time out in Canada and the Mercedes driver raised hope of a second victory in as many races by topping the time charts at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg.
Russell saw off Max Verstappen by 0.065 seconds, with championship leader Oscar Piastri third. Lando Norris sat out the first running of the weekend as Ireland's Alex Dunne was handed his Formula One debut.
🏁 END OF FP1 🏁
TOP 10Russell 💪VerstappenPiastriDunneGasly BortoletoAlbonSainzHamiltonHadjar #F1 #AustrianGP pic.twitter.com/k4bZWqAlxA
— Formula 1 (@F1) June 27, 2025
Dunne, 19, finished fourth, less than a tenth shy of Piastri, with Norris due to return to his cockpit for the second session later on Friday.
Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton suffered a gearbox problem before ending the one-hour running in ninth, half-a-second adrift.
Russell won from pole position in Montreal to take just the fourth win of his career and move to 62 points behind championship leader Piastri.
And the Englishman, whose contract with Mercedes expires at the end of the season, looks set to be among the major players again this weekend after setting the early pace.
Although Verstappen finished second, his Red Bull team-mate Yuki Tsunoda ran off the track at turn three and finished only 17th of the 20 runners, seven tenths behind.
Norris trails Piastri by 22 points in the standings after his collision with his McLaren team-mate in Montreal.
Norris watched the opening session from the McLaren pit-wall, with Dunne becoming the first Irishman since Ralph Firman in 2003 to take part in an F1 event.
'A little boy's dream came true,' said McLaren development driver and Formula Two championship leader Dunne over the radio. 'This is the best day of my life.'
Norris will be back in action when the day's concluding session gets under way at 17:00 local time (16:00 BST).
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Less death, more social media: Formula One films decades apart reveal a changed world
'Let's try to get the season off to a good start, shall we? Drive the car. Don't try to stand it on its bloody ear.' Have you watched the movie? It's about a rule-breaking American Formula One driver, the kind who blows past blue flags and crashes into his own teammate. You must have heard of it. They shot it in real race cars, across some of the most prestigious circuits in the world. It even had contemporary world championship drivers making notable cameos on the track. If you've never watched 1966's Grand Prix, now is the time to do it. This summer's blockbuster slot may belong to F1; and its director, Joseph Kosinski, may have gone to extraordinary lengths to capture the visceral speed of the fastest class in motor sport. But John Frankenheimer got there first. The close parallels between the two films have gone largely unremarked in the reviews. Six decades ago, when the glamour of the sport was peaking, Frankenheimer set out to capture its thrill, daring and inescapable danger. He fixed cameras to the chassis of Formula Two cars – the same substitute Kosinski has used – that hared round Brands Hatch, Spa, Monaco. Like Kosinski, he spliced real race footage into his own. His American lead, James Garner, did his own driving, just like Brad Pitt. There are even occasional shots in Kosinski's film that seem to pay tribute, intentional or not, to its predecessor – the moment that recalls Frankenheimer's stylistic use of split-screen, or when Pitt jogs around the old Monza banking. F1 the Movie, to be clear, is a billion-dollar industry giving itself a full valet – shampooed squeaky clean and buffed to an impossible sheen. But it's also the kind of sports-washing I'm prepared to indulge for the sake of the pure adrenaline thrill. After watching Top Gun: Maverick at the cinema, I walked straight back in for the next screening and sat in the front row so I could pretend to be in the cockpit. At the Imax this week I was practically climbing into the screen. I was definitely the only woman my age leaning into the turns, and wishing they would stop cutting back to Pitt's face so that I got more track time. For a bit of perspective, I had gone with my father, a man with a decades-long following of motor sport and a habit of nitpicking at movie details. Ten minutes into F1's opening track sequence he leaned over, and I braced for a critique of the pit crew's refuelling technique. 'We can go home now,' he whispered. 'It's good enough already.' A movie that can impress my father with its motor racing action deserves all the hype it gets. But neither he nor I had anticipated just how much it would remind us of Grand Prix – or how well that 59-year-old work would stand up in comparison. The Silverstone marching band, paraded past the clubhouse by a moustachioed sergeant-major, has given way to night-race fireworks in Las Vegas, and the ruinous cost of running an F1 team has jumped from a few hundred thousand to £100m. The stomach-buzz as the asphalt whizzes beneath you remains the same. Putting the two stories side by side does, however, show you interesting ways the sport has changed. Grand Prix's opening lingers, fetishistically, over images of working pistons and twisting wrenches. Such lowly mechanical details are almost entirely absent in F1, where the team headquarters looks like a space station and every element of the engineering process is rendered in gleaming sci-fi. There's also a lot less death. Frankenheimer's crashes are genuinely shocking – not because the stunts are realistic (and they are) but because of the bluntness of their outcome. Drivers are catapulted from their seats to fall on whatever part of the landscape they meet first. Spectators aren't safe either. The fact that horrifying incidents are a part of the public's fascination with Formula One is a recurring theme. F1 still plays on the life-or-death stakes, but does it in a very different way, as you'd expect from a film licensed by the governing body as a big-screen advert for the sport. It's also pretty keen that everyone you meet on screen shows motor racing in a good light. Team principals are loving family men! Drivers' managers are cuddly BFFs! People cycle eco-consciously to work! Everyone is so empathic and good at giving advice! It was the latter that had me balking at the chutzpah. There's a point where our hero tells the rookie to stop thinking about his social media. The hype, the fan engagement – 'it's all just noise,' he says. This in a movie that was produced, at phenomenal cost, as a method of growing hype and fan engagement. The film's only baddy, meanwhile, is a corporate investor, who we know must be a bad 'un because he spends his time schmoozing The Money in hospitality. Here's a game for you when you're watching F1: try to go two minutes without seeing or hearing the name of a brand that's paid to be there. I left the auditorium still blinking the name of accountancy software. By contrast, Frankenheimer's film seems bracingly honest. In Grand Prix, the drivers may have moments of self-reflection but they're also uncompromisingly selfish in their pursuit. The philosophical Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sarti suggests they live in denial: 'To do something very dangerous requires a certain absence of imagination.' 'Why do we do it? Why not tennis, or golf?' It's the question at the centre of every motor-racing film. In Le Mans, Steve McQueen answered by stripping out everything but the sound and feel of the track. F1's hero describes the feeling when he's 'flying' (not for nothing does he arrive walking down the tarmac, carrying a duffel like a certain fighter pilot). Perhaps that's what makes motor racing ripe for big-screen treatment – it's the most literally escapist form of sport there is. If F1 gives it the glossy treatment, Grand Prix sees beneath the sheen.
Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Telegraph
Damon Hill interview: I said to Mum ‘I think it's Daddy' and she started screaming
For Damon Hill, next week's British Grand Prix at Silverstone promises to bring back special memories. It is 31 years since the silver-goateed former racer won his home Grand Prix, an achievement even his father, legendary two-time world champion Graham Hill, never managed. But it was what happened after that race that Hill is going to try to recreate next week. '1994 was the first year EJ [Eddie Jordan] got us all up on to his flatbed truck to play rock'n'roll in the paddock,' Hill recalls, smiling. 'He came over with his brother-in-law, or his cousin, Des Large – there was a whole gang of them from Ireland.' A tradition was born that day. Hill, who as a teenager had played in a punk band called Sex Hitler and the Hormones, was on guitar, fellow drivers Johnny Herbert and Perry McCarthy assisted on vocals, Jordan himself was on drums. 'I think [David] Coulthard was on triangle,' Hill says, laughing. 'I'm going to get him up on stage. We're going to try to recapture the enthusiasm of those first few years. Although without EJ there, it's all a bit more daunting!' Hill shakes his head, remembering some of the wilder antics of the irrepressible Irishman, one of F1's great characters and a man who later became his team boss. Sadly, Jordan died in March this year after a battle with prostate cancer. 'Eddie had the energy of a nuclear power station,' Hill wrote in a touching tribute in The Telegraph. 'There will never be another like him.' Hill knows more than most about loss and grief. His entire adult life has been shaped by it. The tragic death of his father on November 29, 1975, in a light aircraft he had been piloting, along with all five of his crew, happened when Damon was just 15 years old. Unsurprisingly, it left a mass of unresolved issues. When Hill won his own world title, 21 years later, in 1996, it was one of the most popular and emotional wins in F1 history. They were the first father-son world champion combination. Murray Walker, who had known Graham well during his career, famously had to stop commentating when Damon clinched the title in Japan because he had a 'lump in his throat' (listen to his commentary below). Damon Hill takes his eighth win of the season, and with it the Drivers' Championship at Suzuka. Murray Walker with commentary. Japan - 1996 #F1 — F1 History (@TodayF1History) February 6, 2024 But for Hill, his 1996 triumph did not give him the closure he thought it might. When he retired a few years later, he still had to come to terms with his grief. Years of depression and therapy followed. 'You can't bring someone back from the dead,' Hill says of what he learnt in those sessions, as he sits back on a sofa in his Farnham home. We are on a video call. 'You can't undo the experience. What you have to do is defuse it. It's like an unexploded bomb. You've got to defuse it, so it doesn't go off at times when you're under stress. Because it will. 'I still get massive anxiety. If something gets slightly too worrying for me, I get this panic attack. My mum had it too. She was on edge her whole life. Because she had been waiting for that call her whole life. All her friends got 'the call', you know? Her friends whose husbands died [in motor racing accidents], they'd all got 'the call'. 'And then Dad retires. She thinks she's in the clear. Her guard is down. And then… 'Oh, here's the call'. So I've lived with that anxiety, that bolt out of the blue. And even if I speak about it now I touch wood.' The man who 'never wanted to be an F1 driver' Hill's story has been told before. His autobiography, Watching the Wheels, published in 2016, was a typically insightful and eloquent attempt to grapple with life's big questions by a man who has become an acclaimed pundit on both television and radio. But it has now been made into a documentary, too, which is why we are speaking today. Hill, a 90-minute film directed by BAFTA-nominated film-maker Alex Holmes, premieres on Sky Documentaries on July 2, the opening day of British Grand Prix weekend. 'I hope F1 fans like it,' Hill says. 'And that people who aren't interested in Formula One get something from it, too. It's a human story, ultimately.' It certainly packs an emotional punch. Right from its opening montage, in which footage of the 1994 world championship denouement in Adelaide (which as all F1 fans know is where Hill was famously denied the title after being punted out of the race by a certain Michael Schumacher) is interspersed with grainy home videos from Hill's childhood, and shots of the plane wreckage. 'My whole life people asked me, 'Do you want to be an F1 driver like your dad?'' Hill says as the opening credits roll. 'The truth is I never wanted to be one. It's almost like I was trying to get back to the start again… the place where it all went off the rails. [Because] if I could get back to the start again, maybe I could put right everything which went wrong.' What drove Hill? Undoubtedly he became an F1 driver because his father was. But would he have become one unless his father died in the way he did? Was he trying to prove himself worthy of his father? To mend himself? Mend his family? These are questions Hill has spent much of his life pondering. He is still not sure. 'Was it like some sort of Greek tragedy?' he asks. 'You know, your fate is set in stone and there's nothing you can do to avoid it. Was that it? I don't know.' He definitely felt a weight of responsibility towards his mother, Bette, and to his sisters Brigitte (18 months older than Damon) and Samantha (four years younger). They had enjoyed a privileged childhood, moving from Hampstead to a large pile in Hertfordshire when Damon was a boy. 'Motor racing was lucrative,' Hill explains in the film. 'Call it danger money. We had a taste of the high life. We were very lucky children.' Family archive footage of Damon and Brigitte playing with their father, swimming, giggling, waterskiing on sunny holidays, attests to that. 'We were all shocked by how quickly the party ended [after he died],' Hill says. 'The world moves on very quickly. Dad was obviously the attraction.' The scenes in which Hill recalls the night his father died are particularly raw. It happened six months after Graham had announced his retirement and the family had 'all breathed a huge sigh of relief', having spent years worrying they might get 'the call'. Damon was watching television with Samantha. 'I can't remember what it was, probably M*A*S*H or something.' The programme was interrupted by a newsflash about a private plane crashing on to Arkley golf course, on the approach to Elstree. Hill knew his father was making his way back to Elstree from a test at the Paul Ricard circuit in southern France, along with five passengers who comprised the core of his new Embassy Hill F1 team. He remembers a 'wave of heat coming up through my legs and then into my face'. Panic. Hill made his way to the kitchen to see his mother, who was entertaining neighbours, waiting for her husband to join them. But before he got there, the phone in the hall rang. 'I hid, because I wanted to hear what they were saying, because I was terrified,' he says. It was a reporter. Bette told them to go away. When Hill told her what he had seen on the news, and said, 'I think it's Daddy', 'she got hysterical – she just started screaming and getting very cross, saying, 'I knew it was too good to be true'.' 'Mum went to five funerals in a week' Life had changed for ever. Not only did the family have to deal with the grief of losing their father and husband, the 'life and soul of every party', someone Damon clearly adored, the aftermath was extremely messy. The plane, it turned out, was not registered properly. Graham Hill's instrument rating, proving he was qualified to fly at night and in poor visibility, had not been renewed. He had borrowed money to fund his team. The family were forced to sell everything, including the house. Hill, barely into his teens, was left with a mass of contradictory feelings; anger, sadness, even guilt. 'It was bewildering. I think I was just at that perfect age of only understanding a bit, but not being able to comprehend or process it all. Obviously there were other families involved so it was not just our grief. My mum went to five funerals in a week, one of them being her husband's. And the reason she couldn't get to the other one was because there were two funerals on the same day. 'Think about that. What was that like for my mum? What could she do? What was it like for those families having my mum there? How did they feel about my dad? You know, I have met some of the children of the other passengers occasionally. But, I mean, it's very difficult. What can you say? You do feel like saying 'Do you want an apology?' But why am I the person who should feel that? And is it even appropriate?' Hill's early years in racing, initially on motorbikes, his real passion, and later cars, are again accompanied by some wonderful home video footage. On his 11th birthday, Hill is presented with a motorbike by his dad at Brands Hatch, an occasion he remembers chiefly for being hugely embarrassed. 'I didn't want to be in the limelight, being pushed forward because you're the son of…' But the real star of the documentary is Hill's wife Georgie. Her contributions are so well-judged, so intimate, the film-makers ended up using only the interviews with her and Hill, leaving out contributions from the likes of Sir Jackie Stewart, Adrian Newey and Ross Brawn. Georgie's memories of their courtship, Hill in his racing leathers draped across his bike, are both amusing and poignant. 'On the surface he was joking around, but he was one of the saddest people I've come across in my life,' she recalls. She remembers going on a trip to a race meeting when suddenly they stopped outside a churchyard and Hill broke down in tears. It was the churchyard in Hertfordshire in which his father was buried. 'That was the first time he'd ever mentioned him to me. And that was after six months.' Georgie's recollections of Imola in 1994, when Ayrton Senna, Hill's team-mate at Williams, died in a tragic accident, are similarly insightful. Before the race, Senna walked into her room in the team motorhome to find her reading and stayed for a while. 'He was asking about Ollie [the Hills' eldest child] and talking about how happy he was with his nephews, playing with them in the sea. He's leaving and he stops and says: 'Don't worry about Damon, he's going to be fine. Williams are a great team. They're safe. They'll look after him.' He literally walked out, went to his garage, went straight to his car. And that was that.' F1 fans might be surprised the film makes no mention of Roland Ratzenberger, the Austrian driver who also lost his life during that Imola race weekend. The makers apparently decided F1 fans already know the history, and those who did not, did not need the extra detail. Producer Simon Lazenby, of Sky Sports F1, who first came up with the idea for the film when he and Damon were flying back from a race in Canada in 2018, admits cost was also a factor. The film was made on 'a tight budget, six figures rather than seven', with every minute of archive footage costing thousands. In that respect, it helps that Hill has always been a keen videographer, just like his father was. 'Dad had a Super 8, an 8mm film. And I think maybe because he did it… I don't know, I just loved capturing those moments, too. I gave the makers hours and hours of home videos to wade through, way too much in fact!' 'I am competitive. And so is Georgie' Hill's rise from novice bike rider to novice racing car driver to F1 test driver to F1 world champion is interspersed with home footage of Georgie and their expanding family. The couple have four children: Oliver, Josh, Tabitha and Rosie. Ollie was born with Down's syndrome, just when Damon was getting his F1 career under way, another key moment. Georgie remembers the hospital staff scribbling down the names of care homes that might take him. 'He wasn't even 12 hours old and they'd laid out his future for him,' she says. 'And I felt: 'Right, OK, if that's all he's worth. He's worth a lot more to us.'' Damon and Georgie are now patrons of the Down's Syndrome Association, as well as Halow, a charity based near them in Guildford which Damon co-founded. The day after we speak, Damon is racing in his annual karting event for the charity at Sandown. It is now in its 12th year. 'Halow provides a community for people with learning disabilities,' Hill says. 'It's unbelievably important. Of course, the funding has all been slashed and they're suffering like many charities.' Ollie usually lives in supported-living across the road, but he is temporarily living back in with them having recently undergone a double hip operation. Hill takes me over to say hello while he is lying on the treatment table and we have a funny conversation in which he cannot hear me because I am speaking into Hill's earpods. Their other son, Josh, was a single-seater racer for a while. Hill was understandably a little anxious when Josh first broached the idea of racing, given what it had put him through. 'Oh my God! No! That's what I thought. But what I said was, 'Oh. OK! Great!'' he wrote in his book. But he backed him all the way to European F3 before Josh quit suddenly in 2013, initially to pursue a musical career. Hill was impressed both by his son's driving skills and his decisiveness; knowing what he wanted in life. It is back to that overarching theme again. What drove Hill? In one particularly revealing bit of home video in the documentary, at a school sports day involving Josh in the early 2000s, Hill might have been interviewing himself. 'You want him to be the best don't you?' he asks Georgie. 'No, as long as he's back safely,' she counters. 'I don't want him to be competitive at all. I want him to enjoy his life.' Hill persists. 'You don't think he can enjoy his life by winning?' Georgie replies: 'I don't want him to feel he always has to be the best at something and if he hasn't won he has failed. I think that's terrible.' It is a fascinating exchange. Would Hill have been happier if he had just stayed away from it all and enjoyed his life? 'Well that's a very keen observation,' he says. 'And yeah, I mean, it is a question I constantly asked myself during my career… it's this contradiction, this paradox, the yin and yang of your being, isn't it? 'Actually in that video, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate. We had just come back from living in Ireland, where everything was very laissez-faire. And then we came back to England and it was Blair's Britain, and we got to this school, I won't mention the name, and it was just push and shove! Everyone was so ambitious. But yes, I am also making a point that I am competitive. And so is Georgie, to be fair. She's a liar! She wanted Josh to win. She wants to win in every game she plays. She denies her competitiveness, but she's got a very, very strong competitive spirit.' Hill laughs. Georgie was, he admits, nervous about contributing to the film at first. 'She didn't want to talk about anything. But I think she thinks it's a good film now she's got over it. You know, it's a weepy really. With a happy ending. And she's brilliant in it. I'm going to be left behind now. She's going to go off with Tom Cruise or someone.' 'You never want to go back and revisit these experiences' It is difficult not to feel happy for Hill. At how his life has panned out. Now 64, he is almost universally loved by F1 fans, not simply because he overcame such a traumatic adolescent experience, but because he never compromised his values. He tried to do it the right way. By his own admission, he was not the most talented driver of all time. But he was one of the most decent. In a sport literally known as the 'Piranha Club', in which the protagonists are mostly alpha males, Hill was the opposite. He was introverted and withdrawn. He had to learn to stand up for himself. But he was never corrupted. It is what gives him authenticity now when he calls out the sometimes erratic behaviour of drivers such as Max Verstappen. Hill's criticism of the Dutchman and his Red Bull team may well have cost him his job at Sky Sports F1 at the end of last year. Verstappen complained about 'biased people' within the paddock and Hill was gone weeks later. 'I like to think not,' he told The Telegraph earlier this year. 'I hope not.' Before he hangs up, I ask whether the film was in some ways cathartic. Going back over his life, trying to make sense of it all. He had done it already in his book, of course. But this was someone else asking him the questions, going over home footage which had long been gathering dust. 'I mean, you never want to go back and revisit these experiences,' he says at length. 'They're painful, and they still carry the residue of the horror and the shock. But I think you'll find that people who do a lot of therapy are quite resilient, because you don't have the illusions any more. You don't have this idea of how it could be if only everything was different. You just try to come to terms with the world, rather than get the world to come to terms with you.' Hill smiles again. 'It was enjoyable [making the film], going through all the old archives, the different haircuts through the ages, the children, everything that was going on contemporaneously. Because that's real life. I mean, all these F1 drivers… we see them now, they show themselves off on their speedboats or whatever. But when they go back to their apartments, they're human like the rest of us. They all go 'What's on the telly?' F1 is this extraordinary, high-octane world, but in between, it's unbelievably normal. I used to come back after winning a race and put the bins out.'
Glasgow Times
12 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Celtic should fear Hearts more than Rangers with Tony Bloom on board
Chairperson Ann Budge expressed hope the gap between her home town heroes and the two biggest clubs in the country could be reduced if a smart strategy was put in place and some shrewd signings made after Bidco 1874 had assumed control in 2014 and the calamitous reign of Vladimir Romanov finally brought to end. A few years later, Stuart Wallace, the then chairman of the Foundation of Hearts fan ownership group, echoed her sentiments. 'We split the Old Firm in 1998 and that's the next step,' he said. 'Can we split them again? There is a next level and the job of the foundation is to help us find it.' Alas, since Wallace's bold pronouncement the Gorgie outfit have finished fifth, sixth, sixth, twelfth, third, fourth, third and seventh in the top flight. Several semi-finals and finals have been reached, but no major silverware has been lifted. Realising their vast potential, never mind punching above their weight, has often proved problematic for a variety of reasons. Read more: Poor recruitment, bad managerial appointments, the Covid-19 pandemic and draining European campaigns have all impacted on their domestic efforts. An extraordinarily hard-to-please fanbase has not exactly been slow to voice its displeasure when standards on the park have fallen short of what has been expected either. So it was maybe no great surprise when seasoned observers of the game in this country were unperturbed when Tony Bloom pledged to try and 'disrupt the pattern of domination of Scottish football which has been in place for far too long' when his £9.86m investment in Hearts was completed earlier this week. They have heard it all before and such fighting talk has never amounted to very much. But there are reasons why things may be different this time around with Bloom, the professional gambler, poker player and entrepreneur who has received a 29 per cent stake in non-voting shares in the Tynecastle club in return for his welcome cash injection, involved. He has, to borrow a phrase made infamous by former manager Craig Levein following an Edinburgh derby win over Hibernian at Tynecastle in 2018, upset the 'natural order' before elsewhere on more than one occasion. It is 65 years now since Hearts lifted the Scottish title for the fourth time in their history. It is four decades since a club other than Celtic or Rangers were crowned champions. But back in May the Royal Union Saint-Gilloise side which the Englishman had revitalised after becoming their majority shareholder in 2018 won the Pro League in Belgium for the first time in no fewer than 90 years. (Image: Steven Paston) RUSG, as they are known for short, have a smaller transfer budget, player wage bill and average home attendance than those of Anderlecht, Club Brugge and Standard Liege, or The Big Three. Genk, Gent and Royal Antwerp should also by rights be finishing above them given their economic advantages. But the data-led approach to player recruitment that Bloom instigated when he first got involved has transformed the unfashionable Brussels club into the dominant force in their homeland as well as formidable rivals in European competition. The London-based betting consultancy Starlizard has provided the gen which has underpinned their success. An army of analysts, statisticians and researchers supply information on every facet of the game in an attempt to gain a competitive edge. The decibel levels of the crowd when a particular player is on the ball is even considered when a potential transfer is being weighed up. Bloom reduced his stake when both they and Brighton, where he is majority shareholder and chairman, both qualified for the Europa League two years ago in order to avoid breaching strict UEFA multi-club ownership rules. He has, however, very much been involved in their inexplicable and unexpected rise. The billionaire has, too, worked wonders at his home town team by investing heavily in their infrastructure, fostering a positive environment for staff to work in and prioritising the development of young players. Kieran Maguire, host of the Price of Football podcast and a Seagulls season ticket holder, this week described him as the smartest man he has ever met. Read more: Jamestown Analytics, a company that is closely linked to Starlizard, have been working with Hearts for some time now and it has by no means revived their ailing fortunes. Quite the opposite, in fact, has been the case. They were instrumental in the ill-advised appointment of Neil Critchley as manager. However, it took three years for RUSG to win promotion back to the top flight on his watch, four years to qualify for Europe and seven years to win the title. Progress is never made overnight, a long-term strategic approach which will yield results in due course is always taken. Strong foundations are laid, quick fixes are avoided. Scepticism has been expressed about how Critchley's replacement Derek McInnes will cope with Bloom's way of working since the former St Johnstone, Aberdeen and Kilmarnock man was brought in back in May. Such cynicism does one of the sharpest, most progressive and experienced coaches in the Scottish game a gross disservice. Can Hearts challenge defending champions Celtic and Rangers for the Premiership in the 2025/26 campaign? Probably not. Can they do so in the future? It would be a major surprise if they were able to end the Old Firm duopoly. But the Ibrox and Parkhead hierarchies should look out for The Lizard, as he is known on the professional poker circuit. Only a fool would bet against him achieving his ambitious objective.
