Katie Grant: Hearts the losers in this game

Hearts fans are not just football supporters, but members of the broader community. Given the game’s dominant place in today’s society, the decision to appoint as a manager a convicted paedophile, a man still on the sex offenders’ register for indecently assaulting and having unlawful sex with a 15-year-old, is clearly not just a challenge for the club, but for us all.

Football is not just a game, as some might pretend, it is a way of life. My children, who are not madly enthusiastic about it, mentioned Rix’s appointment. What people had told them and what they had read surprised them. They thought being on the sex offenders’ register was pretty serious stuff. They were confused. What did I think?

I was still trying to decide when Vladimir Romanov, the owner of Hearts, stuck in his pennyworth. According to him, Rix is a “hero” who was tricked into having underage sex by a girl who made money out of her encounters.

“And then this story comes to life a second time,” says Romanov. “The first time they ‘treat’ the English and now the Scottish public — which I think is a systematic crime involving all those who want to make money out of it ... My responsibility is to defend my staff and players as much as I can. Injustice that I see gives me my strength.”

Romanov speaks in Russian through a translator, which excuses his jumbled syntax, but his meaning is clear enough and it is not helpful to Rix. What Romanov suggests is that he believes that a wrong has been done: in effect, that Rix, despite pleading guilty at his trial in 1999, was not really guilty in every sense of that word, and that although the incidents did take place, the girl was a naughty Lolita who got what she wanted and therefore cannot be absolved of all responsibility.

At least this outburst was useful to me since I now know exactly what I think of Rix’s appointment. It is quite wrong and I don’t think I will be alone in this thought.

Most of those defending Rix’s appointment have done so in the genuine belief that the man has “paid the price” through his jail sentence and deserves a chance to move on. There has been something of a consensus on this point among the country’s football pundits, the only differences of opinion being that some think Rix should wait to move back into coaching until his name is removed from the sex offenders’ register, while others reckon this is purely a formality.

All, however, apart from those who think that young women who flutter juvenile eyelashes are just there for the “roasting”, have taken it as read that Rix does at least recognise his fault. Can we still assume this? Romanov’s remark opens up a new can of worms since the only logical thing we can infer from it is that Rix does not really recognise his fault — and that the chairman’s comments came from him. Indeed, with that mention of “injustice”, it is heavily implied by the club’s owner that Rix feels himself, rather than the girl, to be the victim.

If this is the real reason that Romanov denigrates her publicly, we are no longer looking at “second chances”. You can only give a second chance to somebody who thinks they need one.

Romanov’s comments suggest that we should set aside the judge’s damning words: “There is no evidence in this case at all to suggest, let alone to establish, that this girl deliberately set out to seduce you, no evidence that she was the one who made all the running and no evidence of her initiating any sexual activity, merely a response of the teenage girl to your words of flattery.” Instead we receive hints that His Honour got it all wrong.

Where does this leave Rix’s shamefaced apology, his public acceptance that he stepped well over the line of acceptable behaviour and wishes that he hadn’t? Nowhere.

The public mitigation of Rix by Romanov will reinforce, for many, the sleazy image that football would like to throw off.

I feel sorry for Hearts and its supporters. It is a fine club with a historic name. Even non-football fans know about its players’ exploits in the great war, when the entire team joined up and seven were killed in action, a sacrifice commemorated in the war memorial at Haymarket. Four Hearts players died at the Somme. It is hard to imagine what Sergeants Duncan Currie and John Allan, Lance Corporal James Boyd, Corporal Tom Gracie and Privates Ernest Ellis, James Speedie and Henry Wattie would make of the current headlines, but they would surely believe that the values that made them volunteer for the trenches — decency, honour and courage — have somehow been betrayed.

It is a strange coincidence, too, that Romanov’s declaration should come at a time when the whole issue of convictions, or lack of them, for sexual crimes against women is a topic of hot debate. This was one allegation that had, in football parlance, “got a result”. The girl made a complaint. It was upheld. She was not so drunk she couldn’t remember what happened. The trial did not collapse. Rix did go to jail. Yet now and to the detriment of all future trials, doubts about even this case are being sowed in our minds. No wonder women’s groups are going berserk.

At the trial, when Rix’s defence lawyer did not call the girl to the stand, people thought that maybe he wanted to protect her. Can we really think that now in light of Romanov’s remarks, nobody will be able to look at Rix without wondering what exactly was going through his mind at the time of the incidents, during the trial, in prison and afterwards. I may not know much about the offside rule, but even I know an own goal when I see one.

Taken from timesonline.co.uk