THERE ARE two obvious paths by which to approach comment on the affairs of Heart of Midlothian Football Club. The first could be covered, loosely, by a weary question: where to begin? The second inquiry takes you along a darker, still unmapped by-way that might yet reveal portents significant beyond Gorgie.

Hearts fans ask this one with increasing frequency. You can hardly blame them. They are suffering in the worst way for the sake of a once-great club. No obvious solution presents itself. So they ask: where will it all end?

A lot of people, not just Jambos, would be interested in the answer. Once upon a time, in the good/bad old days, Hearts could flirt with relegation and ruin.

They could be up or down, well run or calamitously run. They could celebrate charismatic figureheads, or damn the latest chancer (alleged). Such was life.

Good or bad, though, it made a kind of sense. Even horrible decisions seemed oddly rational. Through it all Hearts would remain, with Aberdeen, a mainstay of Scottish football. They would always matter. Perennially they would provide a guarantee that, now and then, the Old Firm would receive a fright. Today?

Today you can say two things about the Scottish game. The first is that there is scarcely a predictable result available to the honest punter. Celtic and Rangers are scattering points like confetti. Meanwhile, teams that acquit themselves honourably against the pair one week take fright against minnows the next.

Is the Motherwell bubble burst? Are Kilmarnock back or just backwards? Whatever happened to that Dundee United revival? Anyone prepared to take even a guess at the nature of the next Hibs performance? Does the word "form" have any relationship whatsoever to Aberdeen's hopes?

This is odd of itself, for reasons that need not detain us. The point is that the prevailing conditions ought to be ideal for Hearts. This should, by rights, be their moment. Instead, there is that second thing you can say with certainty: "Scotland's third club" will do well to finish the programme third from bottom.

People are asking if that large, well-rewarded squad is"too good to be relegated". Yes would be the answer, though "good" - since when? - has nothing to do with it. Gretna have provided the wild card to fill out the Tynecastle hand, and that's all. It's not much. The fact that relegation is even being discussed in terms of squad numbers and quality almost tells the story.

Vladimir Romanov, the quick-stepping owner, does not often step the light fantastic in Edinburgh these days. Perhaps he wearies of Scottish media conspiracies. Best put the interpreters on danger money, then, Vlad.

This banker is not even worth the rhyme. You cannot even shape a cruel joke by comparing all the forgotten talk of Hearts as a Champions League force with the club's present circumstances. You cannot begin to calculate the economic consequences of Romanov's ownership, use the word "debt" in any meaningful sense, discuss asset values in terms of players' contracts, or assess the notional market value of the club's fixtures and fittings.

Ask an accountant to take a look at that list, and stand well back. Even by the madcap standards of football, nothing at Tynecastle makes sense. We know that the owner cannot pick a team, or even a goalkeeper. We know that his chances of hiring a coach worthy of the club sank below the horizon long ago. What we don't know could keep conspiracy theorists in business until Elvis (the singing one) returns: what does Romanov want?

Hearts were never just this rich man's toy. He is not, as best we can tell, quite that rich, and the club is not that sort of toy. Things cannot be explained entirely, meanwhile, by an admittedly fascinating import-export business in playing talent from the Baltic lands. And club ownership deployed as a calling card with the Edinburgh banking establishment is no longer plausible, if it ever was.

Meanwhile debt, wherever it finds a final resting place, mounts. Alone among Scotland's top dozen, Hearts break all the rules of prudence and plain common sense. Romanov has contrived a situation whereby he renders the club impossible to sell and impossible to buy. So the new stand that once seemed a sound investment sinks into the maroon-hued ink.

And the team just get worse. Perhaps, by the time you read this, they will have redeemed themselves for that Christmas gift at home to St Mirren. Perhaps. Some of them ransacked the thesaurus after that game to find new words for "apology". A big help.

Yet from what I hear the defeat hurt less, for diehards, than the manner of the surrender. Hearts were always a fighting team. This lot, it is said, didn't care. Or even look as though they were trying to care. If they apologise from now until spring it might just be enough.

Is the proud Vlad content with that? Who will ever know? We can forget all the Strictly Come Losing jokes, however. Mr Romanov reminds us again the criteria by which ownership is assessed and allowed in British football are merely rhetorical. No one asks who, or why, or how. Money, from whatever source, talks a good game.

The hellish frustration for Hearts fans is that there is no obvious way out of this mess. Stephen Frail, "assistant manager", carries the can for the decisions of others while exhausting himself, and his reputation, by attempting to excuse the inexcusable. The team is never done "bonding", yet for the estimable Christophe Berra, receiving the captain's armband is like being handed the black spot.

Senior football in Scotland is too fragile, too precarious, for Hearts to fail. Nevertheless, week in and week out we are watching a calamity unfold. Some of it is utterly inexplicable; some of it is all to easy to explain. But the Scottish game, as a community, had best to begin to prepare its response for the day when Vlad the Tap Dancer takes his last bow.

Taken from the Sunday Herald