Only the haircut is scary as baby-faced assassin makes a mature entrance

ALAN PATTULLO

IT WAS a comment which now seems visionary in its perceptive qualities. Keith Burkinshaw, having been sacked as manager of Tottenham Hotspur by chairman Irving Scholar, turned his head back over a shoulder and gazed back at a White Hart Lane clogged up suddenly by executive boxes: There used to be a football club over there, he lamented.

The intervening years, which have brought prawn sandwiches, breakaway leagues and Roman Abramovich to a yet more corporate table, have made these sentiments no less relevant. And Burkinshaw's barbed observation, delivered over 20 years ago, was graphically brought back to this writer yesterday as the satellite dishes whirred on top of vans brought roaring back to Tynecastle Park after another extraordinary sequence of events.

There used to be a football club over there might have sighed George Foulkes, and the former chairman probably did at some point during the blizzard of interviews he gave yesterday.

The drama brought children as well as newsmen to Tynecastle at lunch-time yesterday, foregoing their diet of grease-swashed pizzas and pies to feast on something as frankly unappetising. They bustled around a front entrance at Hearts where the door is almost hanging off its hinges amid the gusts of sudden exits. It was like extra maths: if a club loses a manager, a chairman and a chief-executive in one fortnight's cull, how much honour can it possibly have left?

Not that the good pupils of Tynecastle High School had long to ponder this poser. Suddenly Roman Romanov, the heid yin's henchman, arrived. And, as someone remarked, you half expected a jagged cut of lightning to zip across the sky and a flutter of bats to gather at his shoulder.

Who are ya? Who are ya? chanted the kids, until the headmistress appeared and led them round the corner by their ears. At least they weren't being marched in file to a salt-mine, a thought which must have caused a tremble in the hand of those members of staff gamely serving tea and coffee to gathered reporters. If getting a club to the top of the league while attracting their biggest crowds for a decade gets you the sack, what is a trail of broken crockery likely to bring?

Who he was was Roman Romanov, so bad they named him twice (sort of). The frighteningly tender-aged son of the owner is now a football club chairman, perhaps the only one in Britain able to claim greater youth than his own team's skipper. There was no truth in the rumour that Stewart Fraser, the one remaining non-Eastern European on the Hearts board, yesterday changed his name by Deed Poll to Fraserski, or came into work wearing a Cossack hat.

His future looks bleak, however. But for Hearts? There used to be a football club over there is what might have been said even had Romanov and his clan not begun plunging daggers into backs. This is what puts the Hearts fans in a tricky position.

Of course they don't like the way their club has been turned into a play-thing, but what might have been the alternative? Not following a team sitting second in the league, still playing at their baronial home, that seems sure. But then again, while there's been fun had this season there were laughs presumably had on the way in the Titanic.

Back inside Tynecastle it was down to business. In a suite above the main entrance, after sandwiches had been delivered on trendy slate dishes, Romanov the younger fastened up his nappy and went to work. Actually, he was rather impressive. George Foulkes' jibe about the debatable wisdom in giving someone barely potty-trained so much authority was dismissed with such disdain that Roman managed the impressive feat of patronising someone over twice his age.

Basically, Romanov junior said, once we'd established what a nappy was (in America, where he studied, they call them diapers of course), he wasn't going to descend to his predecessor's level.

It wasn't a bad way to begin - by putting a Lord in his place. Thereafter it was a fairly smooth trawl through a set of questions which veered from the serious - asset-stripping claims to inquiries about Roman's own credentials - to the faintly aggressive: do you recognise the ruthless dictator your father has been depicted to be? Surprisingly, nope.

He certainly wasn't flayed alive by the reporters, answering questions in the no-nonsense style his haircut - the most functional thing seen at Tynecastle since the last team sent out by Craig Levein - suggested he would

"Bullshit after bullshit" offered one fan outside, having already rammed his car into the one in front in an act that might have been mistaken for rage had he not leapt out and placed a note bearing his phone number behind the dented vehicle's window-wipers.

A decent lot these Hearts fans, but whether they give the Romanovs and co the benefit of the doubt building at Tynecastle remains to be seen.

Taken from the Scotsman