Hearts players hold crisis talks as relegation threat looms

There was a time when a mass meeting of the playing staff at Heart of Midlothian would have conjured up visions of the sort of turnout that used to feature regularly on news coverage when the Clyde shipyards went on strike. Yesterday’s dressing-room summit at the Edinburgh club’s training complex at Riccarton may not have required megaphones to address the workers, but the message is loud and clear: Hearts are in trouble.

A descent down the Clydesdale Bank Premier League to tenth place has become embarrassing. It could become perilous unless the Tynecastle side arrest the slide that saw St Mirren become the latest team to inflict defeat. When Vladimir Romanov spoke two years ago about radically changing Hearts’ horizons, he meant the Champions League – not the Irn-Bru Scottish League first division.

That is not a cheap dig. Both Steve Banks, the goalkeeper, and Stephen Frail, the assistant head coach, admitted in the wake of the 1-0 Boxing Day defeat that they are now looking over their shoulders at bottom side Gretna. The players met yesterday to plan their response to Frail’s challenge to get out of trouble but the only “player” who matters in the drama at Hearts was far removed from the debate.

Romanov, the millionaire owner, remains in Lithuania despite his club’s slide. The man who brought 11 players into Tynecastle in that fabled transfer-window spree of January 2006, has undermined Hearts, firstly with a lack of quality – and clarity – in his signing policy, and then with a complete disinterest in his Tynecastle toy.

Romanov has only visited Scotland twice in the last ten months to watch Hearts. Against Barcelona, naturally, in the glamour preseason friendly, and then for the Remembrance Day Service on November 11, when he spoke to the players before they defeated Aberdeen 4-1. He continues to fiddle from afar – the ludicrous playing, against his coaches’ advice, of Eduard Kurskis, the Lithuania goalkeeper, in the costly defeat at Ibrox - but offers no clear leadership.

“I have no idea if Mr Romanov knows how we are doing, you would need to ask the sporting director [Anatoly Korobochka] or whoever deals with him,” Frail said on Boxing Day, after Hearts were jeered off and Romanov, in his absence, abused by the crowd. “I think he would have to be in the know though, he would have to be.”

With a playing staff that is touching 60 professionals, Hearts ought to be spoiled for choice. However, that argument disappeared long ago. Kurskis was actually sent back to Lithuania in August because he was not deemed good enough to trouble the top three goalkeeping places at the club. The sale of Craig Gordon to Sunderland meant a recall for the erratic Lithuanian, despite the fact that anyone with any football knowledge could see than Banks had proved himself an able deputy to Scotland’s No 1. At the other end of the pitch, Michal Pospisil is currently coming off the bench, despite the fact that the Czech forward was so far out of the picture on August, he was being touted around modest clubs in Holland.

“A few of the senior players in there thought the players needed to have a meeting without any staff there, which we did,” Banks said. “There were a few things said that maybe had not been said before. I think we have to start looking over our shoulders at that [relegation]. I hope that everyone is well aware of the threat of relegation.

“It’s becoming a bit more realistic as time has gone on. I think the club is too good to go down – whether the players are at the moment I don’t know. We are not getting the results. The club, as far as I’m concerned, deserves to be top of the league and be winning cups every year because it is a great club with a lot of tradition. It’s just not happening at the moment.

“Not only was the St Mirren game a bad result for us, it was probably one of the worst performances as well,” he said. “We need to knuckle down and get results and not be too concerned about performances, although it is important to play well. We just have to get three points at the end of the 90 minutes and get some confidence back and hopefully the performances will start coming with the wins.”

Frail, the public face of the Tynecastle farce when his employer has hidden from the Hearts public, is trying not to panic. “Individually, we have got as good a squad as any but, if you don’t play as a team, don’t work together and don’t work harder when things are down then it will be a real struggle.

“It’s clichéd but it’s rolling the sleeves up and running that extra bit, giving that extra bit, tackling that extra bit harder and making sure, if you lose the ball, you work hard to get it back. Confidence is low, you could see it coming with the Dundee United game last year when we were beaten 4-0 but now they don’t want the ball and it’s as low as I’ve seen it.”

Taken from timesonline.co.uk