Hearts revolt against absent owner Romanov

Ewan Murray at Tynecastle
Monday November 20, 2006
The Guardian

Perhaps it was inevitable, but it was certainly earlier than even the most cynical of Scottish football analysts had expected. Hearts supporters - confused, battle-weary, frustrated and ultimately angry by the time events had unfolded here - launched into the first full-scale revolt over the management regime of the club's owner, Vladimir Romanov.

About 200 of them gathered outside Tynecastle's main entrance after this defeat, indulging in such chants as "Can you hear us, Romanov?" Of course he couldn't: the Lithuanian had opted to remain in his home country for the afternoon, meaning the banking tycoon also missed the booing by a large section of the home support directed towards Hearts' Lithuanian players and the sight of scarves being thrown from the stands. It was a catalogue of altogether ugly scenes, but one gets the impression the trouble has only begun for a club who have lumbered from crisis to crisis for the last decade.

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Nacho Novo's late winner for Rangers had precipitated the home fans' ire, a goal which returned the visitors to second place in the Scottish Premierleague, although Paul Le Guen's team are 15 points behind Celtic. In a turgid encounter, Hearts were fortunate Rangers were so lacking in guile because a better team would have departed Tynecastle with a handsome victory.

If the sorry lot who trudged off the pitch at 3.45pm yesterday really are the Heart of Midlothian, then Midlothian is desperately in need of a transplant. There should be no mistake that Hearts are currently in free fall, fifth in the table and beset by the internal problems that have been caused by the owner over the past 12 months. This match supplied proof that Romanov's love affair with a Hearts following who once revered him is well and truly over and the Lithuanian, unsurprisingly, was not even in town to view the evidence of his club's rapid decline.

Steven Pressley, who sat out last week's match at Falkirk after discovering an alleged plot to strip him of the Hearts captaincy, returned to the squad but was only deemed worthy of a place among the substitutes. Pressley was, in fact, one of four defenders on the home bench, with the sport director, Alex Koslovski, claiming before kick-off that "computer data" from the Falkirk match ensured the defence should not be altered.

Strange, then, that arguably the best performer from that encounter, Christos Karipidis, was dropped and Hearts reverted from a four- to three-man back line. The Edinburgh club have had many inadequate performers in their history but Nerijus Barasa, a Lithuanian "full-back", must rank among the worst, yet he continues to take the place of the Scotland international Robbie Neilson.

Novo's strike, his fourth of the season, arrived from 25 yards and was one of precious few shots on target all afternoon. The diminutive Spanish striker, whose return to form has been one of Le Guen's few major successes in his early months as the manager, drilled the ball low beyond Craig Gordon with the aid of a slight deflection from Christophe Berra.

"Confidence goes when you don't win games," said the midfielder Paul Hartley of Hearts' slump, which has seen them fail to record a victory since October 1. "The fans don't like what is going on. A lot of us don't like what is going on."

The only hope of Hartley's and the supporters' desires to see their club return to anything like normality is that Romanov makes his planned trip to Scotland this week to take advice on how to restore harmony at Tynecastle. History suggests, though, that yesterday's revolt will have little impact on the maverick owner.

Taken from the Guardian/Observer