Romanov dynasty plans to rule with an iron fist

ANDREW SMITH

HE FLEW back into the country yesterday with a public relations exercise on the agenda. Too late, his many detractors would say. To them, he is an inscrutable martinet, an outsider whose pursuit of a singular vision for an ailing Scottish institution brought him into conflict with his club's managers, board members, executives, the game's authorities and just about anyone else who crossed his path. Still, it was good to see Fergus McCann at Celtic Park again, visiting the stadium built by his efforts to unveil a statue of the club founder Brother Walfrid.

It is a pity that McCann could not have found the time to hop across to Edinburgh and meet up with Vladimir Romanov. Right now, the Hearts owner surely would welcome a blether with anyone who might have even a modicum of understanding and sympathy for the position in which he finds himself. McCann certainly fits that bill. The turbulent goings-on at the Tynecastle club over the past fortnight have been redolent of the sort of shenanigans in which McCann seemed to be constantly embroiled during his five years in control of Celtic.

Romanov is entitled to draw comfort from such a parallel. As is now happening with the Lithuanian banker, the vilification of McCann reached hysterical levels when he had the temerity to take decisions that were unpopular, and occasionally unfathomable. Crucially, however, the opprobrium heaped upon him did not prevent the Scots-Canadian businessman achieving every one of his stated objectives.

That said, even McCann didn't part company with three senior club figures across a two-week period. Yet, that is exactly the position in which Romanov finds himself after chairman George Foulkes' decision to resign on Monday in protest at the removal of chief executive Phil Anderton, sacked ten days after manager George Burley's departure "by mutual consent" as the result of "irreconcilable differences".

Rumours about the off-field circumstances surrounding last weekend's derby win by Hibernian at Easter Road - events which are understood to have precipitated Anderton's demise - seem in danger of growing arms and legs. The actual chain of events appears thus. On Saturday morning, Romanov and Anderton had a heated exchange over the chief executive's wooing of Claudio Ranieri for the Hearts management post. With the Italian's salary demands six times the £300,000 basic on offer, the Tynecastle club's owner considered the pursuit of Ranieri pointless, but only found that out after an embarrassing meeting with the Italian.

Later, sharing the directors box with Hibs chairman Tom Farmer and SPL executive chairman Lex Gold, Romanov, by all accounts possessed of a hair-trigger temper, became increasingly exasperated at on-field events, showing a perspective on the game that was at odds with that of everyone else present. Speaking to this newspaper, Foulkes says the Gold and Farmer were "perplexed" by the Lithuanian's disparaging of Hibs' style (which he denounced as overly physical) and of the referee. But the Hearts owner did not, as has been claimed, dispatch Anderton to the dressing room at half-time with a note.

Neither, as one commercial radio station has alleged, did the two men end up in a shouting match at an impromptu meeting of Hearts officials in the Hibs boardroom afterwards. "We simply had an informal chat that was really to communicate the anxiety felt over the need to conclude the process of recruiting a new manager quickly," said Foulkes, who was also present.

Eye-witnesses who were present in the Hibs' boardroom directly after the match talk of an "amusing" scenario which saw Hearts' Lithuanian board members huddle around for feverish discussions before "an emissary was sent to summon Foulkes and Anderton". At no time during these talks was Anderton's position an issue, according to Foulkes. "This didn't come up till later that evening at the hotel where Romanov was staying," the Labour peer says.

Foulkes then expressed his implacable opposition to relieving the chief executive of his duties and threaten to resign if that course of action was taken. This led to Romanov driving down to Foulkes' Ayrshire home on Sunday with service station wine and flowers to persuade him to stay on and support the sacking. At this point Romanov raised the possibility of pulling out of the club should Foulkes do otherwise.

After a board meeting at 1pm the following day, Anderton duly received his jotters and Foulkes then stepped down. The veteran politician has said this week that no reasons were given to the board for Anderton's dismissal. Now he admits that "tensions created by Phil being upset at Romanov's interference were evident for some time".

Foulkes dances round the issue but it is possible to infer from his carefully chosen words that some of these tensions can be traced to Anderton's conduct over Burley. Romanov was not impressed that his chief executive had persuaded him to appoint a manager without first making it clear to Burley that Romanov had very clear ideas on how the club should be structured and organised. Those ideas, it quickly transpired, were very different to Burley's, producing a conflict which led to the manager's departure. The responsibility for that embarrassing debacle, believed Romanov, lay at Anderton's door.

Romanov's camp have privately claimed that Anderton either did not investigate the circumstances behind Burley's departure from Derby, or was unwilling to share his conclusions with Romanov. The chief executive further blotted his copybook by proving unwilling to confront Burley over the allegations that he was drinking too heavily, even if those rumours subsequently proved wide of the mark. "We were all aware of the rumours, " says one Hearts player. "If there was a problem we would have known about it at training first thing in the morning. But George was always in sharp and his training was brilliant."

Former colleagues describe Anderton as "more front than substance". He certainly worked hard to impress Romanov with grandiose schemes and put a positive sheen on every aspect of his work without realising that it was a pattern of behaviour guaranteed to raise Romanov's hackles. The Lithuanian eventually began to question Anderton's judgment, particularly after he and Foulkes both lobbied hard for John Robertson to be given more time at the tail end of last season, a decision which Foulkes now admits was wrong. When Burley followed Robertson out of the door, it was the beginning of the end for the beleaguered chief executive.

Basing himself in London last week to take charge of the quest for a new coach, Romanov is determined to put Anderton's heel-dragging in context, and has apparently already offered the job to a manager whose appointment will be announced this week. That, believes Hearts' majority owner, will quell the disquiet over his ruthless shot-calling.

Foulkes has branded him "a great dictator" and a "megalomaniac", yet those traits are hardly uncommon in self-made men worth a quarter of a billion pounds. As with McCann, people patently work for Romanov rather than with him. Foulkes find that unacceptable.

"He cannot handle it when anyone challenges him and he wouldn't accept even comments or suggestions," he says.

"George Burley always chose his own team but the fact that he was not prepared to have it any other way was perhaps why he did not last. In the senior positions Romanov will appoint people who will do exactly what he tells them and I could not be party to that, or party to the way he was prepared to treat people who were doing good jobs. I thought he would be a Roman Abramovich type and put people in place then just let them get on with running the club. His fanaticism for football doesn't allow him to do that, though."

Foulkes also accepts that he didn't appreciate the degree to which the 58-year-old former sub-mariner's upbringing and military service under the old Soviet regime would determine his management style. The much younger Abramovich belongs to an entirely different generation, with the 39-year-old owing his fortune to the breakdown of the hierarchical structures under which Romanov prospered. Abramovich comes from a generation which considers a celebration of individual wealth decadently western. Romanov graduated from a different school altogether.

Yet Romanov is hardly the first club owner to insist on being the final arbiter in any decisions affecting his investment. Like McCann a decade earlier, he is happy to ride roughshod over native conventions to protect his interests. In 1998, Wim Jansen resigned two days after delivering Celtic's first title in ten years. In the aftermath, McCann said he would have dispensed with the coach anyway because he was not committed to working within exactly the sort of general manager/head coach structure Romanov is intent on introducing at Tynecastle.

In part, Jansen's relationship with McCann broke down because the Dutchman took umbrage at being asked to grade his squad members from A to E, a move designed to allow the club to assess each player's importance. "That is uncanny," Foulkes says on being told of this. "Any game that Romanov attended he would give the Hearts players marks out of 10."

Romanov and son Roman niggled away at Burley over his team selections and disinclination to deploy their countryman Saulius Mikoliunas. Yet it is symptomatic of a need for control that has seen the five-man board now contain just one Scot, finance director Stewart Fraser. If that isn't proof of a wholesale takeover, then the appointment of 30-year-old Roman Romanov as chairman and acting chief executive is. But then is that so surprising?

Look at what's happened at Old Trafford, where Joel Glazer now rules the roost. The fresh-faced Romanov has, after all, already been the second-in-command when his father is in town, his eyes and ears when he's not. Conspiracy theories centring on a plot by Romanov to get hold of Hearts' land at Gorgie are wide of the mark, as Foulkes accepts. "He wants the club to succeed, I don't think there is any question of that," he says. Nor does Foulkes believe that there is anything suspicious in his desire to acquire the entire Hearts shareholding so that he can de-list Hearts from the Stock Exchange and revert it to a private company. While some wonder whether Romanov would then sell the land, Foulkes offers a far more innocent explanation for the Lithuanian investing £6m in shares while allowing the club's debt to creep up to £19.6m. "If he wiped out the debt without being sole owner, he would merely be subsidising other shareholders," he says.

Despite taking a battering in the press, the lack of protest from Hearts fans suggests that they agree with Foulkes' assertion that Romanov is the "only show in town" and accept that there would be no Tynecastle - and possibly no Hearts - had the Baltic knight not galloped over the horizon. And while many overlook their standing in the league table, they are in a Champions League placing and realistic title challengers for the first time this century.

"Romanov was the only show in town (last November) and he is still the only show in town now," Foulkes concedes. But if he carries on making enemies and alienating people in the way that he has over the past year, Hearts will remain more like a freak show than the main event.

Mind you, at least Mr McCann would be impressed.

Taken from the Scotsman