Romanov turns his focus to Kaunas's biggest night

IF YOU can imagine Hearts against Liverpool in the Champions League, and the fever which would grip Edinburgh in the event of such a pairing, then you have some idea of what it's like to be in Kaunas, Lithuania's second city, this week.

The analogy is fitting since Vladimir Romanov, the major shareholder at Hearts, is also the principal backer of FBK Kaunas, the team about to host the biggest club match in the history of this Baltic nation. They were hammering together the rigging for cameras last night with Sky transmitting the game around the world just days after the same S Darius and S Girenas Stadium - named after the first Lithuanian pilots to cross the Atlantic - staged the European Junior athletics championships, with the tread of shot putts still evident in the rutted turf.

Get one thing straight: this poor relation of Edinburgh's notorious Meadowbank Stadium isn't where Peter Crouch, Liverpool's new £7 million signing from Southampton, will have envisaged making his competitive debut for the European champions.

Never mind Crouch, it is also a highly significant week for Romanov. Not only are Kaunas performing at a rarefied level, but Saturday will see Hearts kick off their first season under his control with a match against Kilmarnock. Romanov has already joked in private that these games against Liverpool offer him the chance to run the rule over some signing targets for his Tynecastle operation, and though made in jest this comment perhaps indicated that while his heart lies with Kaunas, his hometown club, his fierce ambition is stoked by the Scottish branch of a football empire including MTZ Ripo of Minsk.

Kaunas have been handed a royal flush with the visit of Liverpool, but Hearts perhaps remain Romanov's prime concern, something illustrated by the heavy Lithuanian influence on the Tynecastle board and the shipping-in of either prized or promising players from the country, something which continued yesterday with the signing of former Porto striker Edgar Jankauskas from Kaunas on loan.

Some idea of the relative standings of the two clubs, and the non-dynamic nature of Lithuanian football, is supplied by the fact that Lithuania's first full house for a football match since independence in 1990 - the stadium's capacity is 8,200 - will be recorded this evening.

But the country is no backwater. Big matches tend to bring out the best in Lithuania, with Germany and Spain having both been held to draws in Vilnius. Tonight offers another chance to test how far the nation has come. It also represents some degree of payback for Romanov, whose company Ukio Bankas, the shirt sponsors of Hearts, have long provided funds for a club known only for their mediocrity.

Fortune means that tonight the eyes of Europe will be trained on a small municipal stadium in a city known as the country's merchant prince due to its trade-dominated past. It's unusual for the European champions to come calling at this nascent stage of the Champions League. Emphasising the incongruity of seeing the holders' name in the preliminary rounds - Liverpool didn't finish high enough in the Premiership to warrant a pass straight into the group stage - is the identity of Kaunas' opponents in the previous round.

Romanov's team overcame part-timers HB Torshavn of the Faroes 8-2 on aggregate, with the second leg played just a week ago. Further stressing the links between Hearts and Kaunas was the hero of that match's sudden appearance the following night in a maroon shirt in a friendly against Middlesbrough. Arturas Rimkevicius, who scored twice in a 4-0 win against the Faroese, played the second half as a trialist having only arrived in Edinburgh that afternoon. He was back in Kaunas this week and is in the squad tonight.

Romanov is being similarly liberal with his favours. His decision to invest in Hearts was greeted with suspicion both in Scotland and his own country. Lithuanians wondered why he was so intent on investing in football in a place so far from their own borders, particularly when his philanthropy in the past has been mostly confined to his homeland. A church he passed regularly on the road from Kaunas to the capital is now a beautifully restored place of worship due to Romanov first noticing its waning state, and then funding its rehabilitation.

Romanov's reticence has supplied him with an air of mystery and last night sports journalists from England were searching for information about this benefactor who has let at least one personal detail slip: he made his first profit by selling old Beatles records.

It at least offered the reporters a line, something the Liverpool manager, Rafael Benitez, refused to yield in a pre-match press conference. No he hadn't seen Kaunas play, admitted Benitez.

No-one asked why he hadn't just made his way to Tynecastle last week to view the side destined to become, perhaps, the real powerhouse of Lithuanian football.

Taken from the Scotsman