Stark contrast, but Leicester job was 'mistake'

HAVING been rejected by the club as a teenager - agonisingly, they chose his elder brother, Paul, instead - Craig Levein perhaps recognised the poetry involved in having made Raith Rovers wait anxiously for his decision to stage a startling return to management this week.

He carefully contemplated their offer to succeed Gordon Dalziel, aware that the move would warp a managerial career curve that began a few miles away in Cowdenbeath, and most recently arced as high as Leicester City. Raith Rovers, he knew, would be regarded as an odd staging post, although only by those with no knowledge of his background. Just as fans have reclaimed the club, so Levein has this week sought to recover a past.

"I was at Lochore Welfare with my brother," he remembers. "He got signed by Raith Rovers and I wasn't. I was gutted. I was desperate to play for them, but on the day they came to watch me I was clearly rubbish."

The snub scarred him since it was at Raith Rovers where a man known as a student of football began his education. His uncle Harry, retired and in need of a Saturday afternoon companion, would take young Craig to Stark's Park in the days when they'd drum out odes to Gordon Wallace on the corrugated iron at back of the old Links Street end terracing. "I grew up in Aberdour," says Levein. "If you go the coast road it's half way between Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline. I suppose if my uncle Harry had been a Dunfermline fan, I would have gone there."

If ever Raith needed a link to a fondly remembered past it is now, although it is true that Levein, too, is happy to be allowed this indulgence. Not only is this proud Kirkcaldy club in need of restoration, but Levein also has been shaken by a 14-month spell with Leicester City that ended just weeks after a famous FA Cup victory over Tottenham Hotspur. From a match shown live to the nation, after which BBC presenter Gary Lineker paid tribute to Levein's tactical acumen, to Stranraer in the Scottish Second Division this afternoon.

There are few other walks of life than football where a man can so willingly be led back to his humble beginnings in a way that would never be acceptable to, say, a former Fleet Street editor invited back to run an old parish newsletter.

Ian McCall has done it most recently at Queen of the South, drawn home to Dumfries by the promise of some solace on the Solway after a wretched time at Dundee United. In the Highlands, Steve Paterson withdrew to Morayshire and Forres Mechanics after a similarly harsh ejection from Aberdeen.

"We just hope the club can get under his skin," says John Drysdale, one of assorted heroic figures at the club who have been unable to resist a downhill slide as steep as Pratt Street itself.

Drysdale's phrase is a choice one, since Levein has spent his initial days seeking to avoid being jabbed by splinters in an old main stand where broken chairs and tables litter the rooms. It's hardly surprising that club officials have been unable to maintain this idiosyncratic delight of Scottish footballing architecture. They have had more to occupy them in a recent history that has included such disaster movies as the Claude Anelka experiment. When not cleaning up after rogue owners, the club were dealing with bogus player CVs such as the one purporting to be from a young Serie A star that landed on the manager's desk last season. Dalziel managed masterfully to sum up the mood at the club in the aftermatch of the failed hoax: "I wasn't really pinning my hopes on it to be honest."

A more likely source of succour is Levein, although his sudden presence amid the clutter of the main stand seems almost as crazy. The last time this writer saw Levein he was entertaining guests in a room the size of an aircraft hangar at the Walker's Stadium after a Leicester City game against Plymouth Argyle. This week any such social engagements have been conducted in cramped rooms and amid piles of laundry and plates. If he's lucky, the key to the board room might be fetched by one of the group of alarmingly young players who help supply the club with dynamism each day. To their credit, Raith have maintained a full-time Under-19 set-up.

"Obviously the place is a bit rickety, a bit run-down," comments Levein. "As soon as you walk through the door you can see that. A club's fortunes ebb and flow. When things are going well, everything gets done. You walk in the door and there's bright lights. Everything is sparkling. You come here and the shades haven't been dusted. You get the feeling that it can't have been great to come in here everyday to work."

There isn't another club matching Raith Rovers' profile who could so effectively have courted Levein. Job vacancies at clubs with no kit man, no fitness coach, no goalkeeper coach and only three full-time professionals don't tend to attract someone regarded as one of Scotland's most respected managers. But Raith had already cast a spell on a young Levein, with the recruiting process having started much longer ago than last Friday, when contact with Levein was first made. Such old legends as Murray McDermott, Bobby Ford, Donald Urquhart and Chris Candlish first alerted Levein's interest in the club, and he confesses to the part played by sentiment in his decision to accept Raith's offer.

"It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to have just waited," he says. "I am fairly confident I would have been offered a job in the SPL or down in England in time. If it wasn't Raith Rovers I would have said no. I was deliberating, but then I thought: it's Raith Rovers. There was a part of me that always wanted to play here, and that's satisfied, perhaps, by being manager."

He still required time to think about the offer, and maintains that it might be so temporary his reign will be counted in weeks. Raith know that should a tempting offer from a higher division arrive, Levein could be off. That said, he is still likely to beat the tenure of Tommy McLean, who famously lasted only six days in the hot seat.

Levein sat with Chris Robinson, the former Hearts chief executive, at dinner last weekend and debated the pros and cons of making what many might consider a step back. In the end, though, he made his own mind up, simply glad to be back working at a club where he feels in control. Towards the end at Hearts off-field anxieties had made the job an almost impossible one, while at Leicester he regrets agreeing to work for a board which contained too many factions.

"At Hearts and Cowdenbeath, although there were directors, I was really only working for one person," he reflects. "At Leicester it was a lot more difficult. There were 9 or 10 directors, no-one owned more than 10 per cent of the club. When things were tough, I knew there were a few there who hadn't been too keen on me getting the job, and I just didn't feel supported. I made a mistake in taking that job, but I was desperate to get out of Hearts, with all the protests going on. I didn't see any light at the end of the tunnel, otherwise I would have stayed. Of course, days after I gave my word to the Leicester board, [Vladimir] Romanov arrives..." Earlier this week he sat up in the stand and between answering questions from a local journalist, found himself reminiscing. Over there was the spot where he scored an equaliser for Hearts in a league match, his first and only goal at Stark's Park: "I went daft - nobody could work out why I was celebrating so much."

Another part of the field marks the spot of a less distinguished moment, when he broke the jaw of team-mate Graeme Hogg after a bust-up during a friendly. In the club's website report of Levein's arrival, the photograph used of Levein - taken during an encounter with Raith Rovers - actually showed Hogg in the background. It seems he will never be allowed to forget, although other memories of the place Levein clearly prefers to cherish.

"I was talking away, but my mind was wandering," he recalls. "I started thinking about how there used to be a burger van sat up there, where the supporters would go up the back to visit. I think they still do. And as a young seven-year old boy I'd be standing there with all these 17 and 18 year olds, who'd all be banging on the back of the corrugated iron singing Molly Malone. I remember the ash, the railway sleeper terraces.

"It was just good to be able to sit there and take it all in again."

Taken from the Scotsman