Andy Halliday bounced into Hearts media briefing yesterday with a 'buongiorno' and a wave for the assembled Italian press
After spending a summer of fine-dining in Florence, the Jambos midfielder proved not to be as fluent in diplomacy after also announcing his boyhood favourites were AC Milan. The press call to prepare for a crunch Europa Conference League clash with Fiorentina was certainly a more light-hearted affair than what's about to unfold tonight.
A clash which can become a door opener towards qualification for the Edinburgh club and Halliday immediately nailed his colours to the mast. He said: “I don’t want to disappoint any Fiorentina fans but it was always AC Milan for me. The kit, some of the legends they had, that millennial team and the 2010s after that, they had some fantastic teams.
Serie A has always been an amazing league, even now you look at Fiorentina and they are one of the massive clubs, so it will be great to play against them. I actually went to Florence on my holidays in the summer there so I know it’s a beautiful city. It’s going to be a great occasion for a lot of our players to go and play in a stadium that is so historic.
I’ve been to a few places in Italy on holiday, Florence was always one I wanted to visit as I had heard it was very beautiful. I did a little tour, I went to Rome, Florence and Bologna for a couple of nights. Great food, I think that’s the main thing."
The 30-year-old pulled on his serious face when he outlined the size of the challenge ahead as Gorgie gets braced for a visit from genuine Italian football royalty. He said: "It’s going to be a massive occasion. I think it shows how far we have come as a football club since I’ve been here. We are hoping to get a positive result to put us in a good position in the group. But we are facing a fantastic football club with great tradition and great football players.
"My first memories are growing up watching Italian football on Channel 4 and watching players like Gabriel Batistuta at Fiorentina and the greats like that. When you watch Fiorentina they are clearly a very brave team in and out of possession with a lot of top quality players who are very technical. With that comes areas we can exploit but we know we are facing a very good side. For us to get a result we need to be on top of our games. So it’s important we do what we are good at tonight."
Hearts have been buoyed by their recent win in Latvia against Rigas FS after the low of an opening group loss to Istanbul Basaksehir and he insists it's been a steep learning curve of that dos and don'ts at European level.
He said: "They have all posed different challenges. Zurich was a fantastic performance from us for the first 60 minutes then we were down to 10 men and that changed the game. Istanbul was one we had to learn from. At this level of football, you can’t get away with being as exposed as we were at times. We were still really good in flashes in that game and we will try and implement that tonight. ‘But of course you learn from these sorts of games. That’s why it’s so important to debrief where you can do better and we did that in Riga."
Fiorentina are without a win from two opening Group A games but he's done his homework on the Italians and he believes they are not dissimilar to Premiership champions Celtic in the attacking vigour they bring to their game. He said: "I think they play a little similar to Celtic in that they press high, play to a high intensity and I think it works very well for them at times. But when you don’t get it right it does leave weaknesses.
"Listen, we know we are facing a very good side. We need to focus on what we do as well. If they leave areas for us to try and expose, we’ll do that, but we know we’ll need to play well to get anything from the game. I think they’ve been a bit of a mixed bag domestically this season but we’ve certainly done our due diligence watching them and we can see they are a top quality side. But of course we want to exploit teams’ weaknesses as well.
"Over the last two days we have looked at what Fiorentina are good at and what they are not so good at. They are a very brave team in possession, they try to play out from the back, they use their defensive midfielder to advance up the pitch. But out of possession they press really high. Quite a lot of the goals they have conceded have been balls over the top and in behind.
"Coming here we want to make Tynecastle a fortress and make it difficult for them. But I see two good teams going at it and trying to get a result."
