Non-championship leader
In addition to Braga’s joy, the team’s impressive form helps. SThere are nine wins and two draws in eleven roundswhich makes coach Derek McInnes’ men lead the championship with a nine-point lead over second-placed Celtic, who have one game less than Hearts.
Speaking of Celtic, both the blue-and-white emblem from Glasgow and its rival Rangers, clubs that have dominated the local championship for 40 years, have already tasted the venom of this possibly historic Hearts. In matches against the two main teams from Glasgow, Cláudio Braga’s team won both (2 – 0 against Rangers and 3 – 1 against Celtic), showing that they really want to repeat the feat of Aberdeen led by Alex Fergunson in 1984/85, the last league champion before the Celtic/Rangers dynasty.
“With Celtic it was very special, one of the biggest clubs I’ve ever played against, and with Rangers, away from home, at Ibrox Park with more than 50 thousand people, it was also top”, says the striker who still fondly remembers another match, played in the pre-season.
“We played Sunderland, we won 3-0 and I scored a goal against a Premier League team. I felt like I could play at that level. Of course it was just a friendly, but they also wanted to win and we were better than a team that is now doing very well in the English championship”, says Braga, remembering the good form of Sunderland, currently fourth in the Premier League.
Hired by AI scouting
The success of The Jam Tarts‘jelly pies’, the Scottish club’s nickname, has an explanation. The Portuguese says that, just as happened with him, several other athletes were recruited through an innovative performance analysis program With the help of Artificial Intelligence, the Jamestown Analytics.
“It’s not a normal form of scouting. Tony Bloom, who owns Brighton, Como and Union St. Gilloise, is now also a minority partner here at Heartsand is the only one who has access to this way of recruiting. You can recruit athletes with potential, but perhaps for low prices. So it wasn’t just me who arrived, but everyone who came was showing that it really is possible to play at this level”, he highlights.
Speaking of technical level, the difference between football in Norway’s second division and the Scottish first division was something that scared Braga at first. “I was a little scared by the level of quality. Even though I knew I could be capable of playing at this level, training with athletes who had already played in the Premier League, with a lot of experience, a lot of quality, made me think, at first, that I was screwed”, recalls the good-natured goalscorer.