The Hot Seat?

Alan Campbell assesses the challenges facing Hearts as they aim to unveil their next appointment before next week’s Aberdeen match

AS a cultured playmaker with Arsenal and England, there was never the slightest suggestion that Graham Rix was a carthorse. But in formally unveiling the 48-year-old as head coach of Hearts on Tuesday, Vladimir Romanov and his son Roman stand accused of putting the cart ahead of the new director of football.

The new DoF, or sporting director as the Lithuanians prefer to call him, is expected to be announced this week. As the senior of the two appointments being made to replace George Burley, it seemed obvious the sporting director should have a major input into the choice of head coach. But, and not for the first time, we were reminded that logic and professional football are usually incompatible.

Had Gianluca Vialli, who once described Rix as his right arm, been lurking in the wings, this latest episode of the Tynecastle soap opera might at least have made some sense. The multi-millionaire Italian, though, has never had any intention of slumming it in Edinburgh with his former Chelsea first team coach; Hearts’ supporters, one suspects, may have to once again content themselves with a lesser light.

To be fair to the Romanovs, it wasn’t from their quarter that the names of Claudio Ranieri, Ottmar Hitzfeld and Sir Bobby Robson leaked as candidates to replace Burley. That Ranieri and Robson, were genuinely interested in joining Hearts says much for the growing status of the Edinburgh club, but very rich men do not accumulate wealth by paying vastly inflated salaries to their employees.

Instead, the shock appointment of Rix as head coach speaks volumes for the way the Romanovs do business. It is greatly to their credit that they were prepared to judge Rix on his coaching ability alone and give him a second chance to re-establish his credentials, but it is a high-risk strategy – and one, moreover, in which they have taken the cheap option.

Even Vladimir Romanov’s closest associates confess they have often found it virtually impossible to fathom his reasoning in business dealings. Usually, though, he is proved correct; the increasingly agitated Hearts supporters will be praying that the Lithuanian’s hunch about Rix has the same outcome.

It does, though, beg the question of exactly how the sporting director’s job is to be defined. Clearly, given that Rix is already in place, the new man is not going to play much of a role in first team matters. “The sporting director will be scouting and looking for new players from different clubs,” explained Roman Romanov. “It will be his decision who he takes to Hearts, but he and Graham Rix will have to explain why. If he (Vladimir Romanov) spends money he wants to know why he is doing it.”

But hang on a minute. Does Romanov Snr not already have a scouting network in place, one which has brought Takis Fyssas, Samuel Camazzola and Ibrahim Tall to the club? Given that he has, the role of the new sporting director looks set to be further diminished. Not directly involved in first team matters, looking at players who will in all probability have been recommended to him by Romanov Snr, perhaps the new appointee’s most significant role at Hearts will be to conduct the transfer and signing business while also becoming the footballing face of the club. It’s no doubt an important job, but does it add up to one that would still interest a Robson or any other high profile candidate?

The attraction to the new regime of having a sporting director in place is that it might help them cut out, or more realistically reduce, the monies pocketed by agents when players move to and from Hearts. Vladimir Romanov’s low regard for the breed is already on record, and his son added: “The agent sometimes has a very, very bad influence on football.

“That’s my personal opinion. What more clubs in Europe are trying to do is bring in a sporting director and do away with the middle man. The sporting director can go direct to the other club – why go to agents?”

The Romanovs’ preference for financial prudence was demonstrated in the appointment of Rix. With chief executive Phil Anderton, who courted Ranieri and brought him to Edinburgh in a blaze of publicity, no longer at the helm, Romanov Snr dealt directly with Rix and met a man desperate to return to football and prepared to accept the job on terms which would have been sneered at by the previously named candidates.

It was, frankly, an appointment which was beyond the comprehension of some of Romanov’s advisers, not to mention an astounded media and an irate Hearts support. If Anderton didn’t tick all the boxes as chief executive, nor Burley as manager, Rix doesn’t appear to tick any.

In the period between news of the appointment leaking out late on Saturday night, and the extraordinary press conference at Tynecastle which franked the decision, there was ample opportunity for Romanov to bow to fan pressure and tell Rix that, after all, he wasn’t the right man for the job.

Instead, Hearts’ new owner demonstated that he is either a genius or unbelievably pig-headed. In losing the services of Anderton, Burley and George Foulkes he had already taken a huge gamble with his club’s Premierleague title aspirations; appointing Rix as head coach makes that task, on the face of it, even harder.

Rix, who had to run the gauntlet of a hate-mob at Tynecastle on Tuesday before being subjected to a barrage of questions relating to a criminal offence for which he has been tried and punished, is now in what many would perceive to be a highly unenviable position for all that he has described it as “a fantastic opportunity”.

Rix, who said he felt chairmen of other clubs were making moral, rather than footballing, judgements on him when they rejected his numerous applications for jobs, added: “I’m grateful for the chance and I don’t want to waste it.”

Nevertheless, with Hearts second only on goal difference to Celtic at the top of the Premierleague, Rix will be expected to deliver the title or become just another discarded Romanov employee. Nor will there be any compensation, as his contract runs for only six months. And all this against a background of cruel, baying taunts from supporters of other clubs.

In accepting this assignment, Rix has already shown courage to match the dignity with which he responded to his baiters on Tuesday. The question is whether the undoubted coaching ability of his Chelsea days has survived the harrowing experience of unemployment, rejection and fruitless spells at Portsmouth and Oxford. If it has, Romanov has got himself a bargain because nobody in Scottish football is more desperate to prove himself than Rix.

Although he will be allowed to bring in an assistant coach if he wishes, Rix is fortunate in having John McGlynn, who won three games out of four as caretaker manager, as a sounding board. But perhaps the most important man at Hearts remains club captain Steven Pressley, whose qualities of leadership have kept Hearts on a level with Celtic. Pressley’s team-mates have, despite the derby defeat to Hibs, followed his example. The early indications are that they have taken to the new head coach, whose standing in football is much higher than it is outside it. Regardless of who is brought in as sporting director, or how much more Romanov intends to meddle in team matters, it is Pressley and the players who will define Hearts’ season.

13 November 2005

Taken from the Sunday Herald