ROMANOV LOSING HEARTS

SAY WHAT you will about Lord George Foulkes, he doesn't make life easy for himself. Bad enough to be one of Labour's Holyrood parliamentarians in these fraught times. When your chosen recreation is following Heart of Midlothian, thoughts of frying pans and fires can never be very far away.

Foulkes is not one to keep his thoughts, or his discontents, to himself. He does not go in for private grief. Last week he expressed the thoughts of all those angry Hearts fans who streamed away from Tynecastle before the end of a comprehensive some say near- disgraceful four-goal defeat at the hands of Rangers. Does the owner still care?

The cliché "talks a good game" could have been invented for Vladimir Romanov. What has he not promised the fans?
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In the early days, you may remember, the vaunting dream was to turn Tynecastle into nothing less than a European powerhouse. These days Hearts are struggling to get on the right side of the SPL split. If they fail, it will count as a very dismal first.

No-one can say that Romanov has not done things for Hearts. Or should that be to Hearts? There's debt no-one can quantify a dangerous sign in itself that will balloon if and when the ground is remodelled.

The bulk of the money may be owed to the owner's Ukio Bankas, but only a fool would count it a consolation. Sums of £20 million and upwards are the record of an absolute sporting and business failure, whoever picks up the tab.

Then there is the squad. No-one can claim that Romanov has failed to bring players to Tynecastle.

At the last count, indeed, there were 57 full-timers on the books. Yet somehow it is proving beyond the wits of all concerned to fashion that army into the sort of serviceable 11 capable of sustaining the club's traditional status as the third force in the Scottish game.

The owner's propensity for shipping out the best of what is available when he is not alienating loyal servants has become a trademark. It is possible that nothing would have persuaded Andrius Velicka, the most impressive performer in recent months, to remain at Tynecastle. A million sterling is meanwhile a million sterling for any SPL club. But a sale to Viking Stavangar? Involving your best player?

Romanov, a businessman of repute, is oddly careless in these matters. The coaches who have come and gone are proof enough of that. George Burley, to name one, is good enough to succeed Walter Smith and Alex McLeish as Scotland manager. Not good enough, though, at least in the Romanov rewrite, to run the Gorgie pan-European powerhouse.

Stephen Frail has been minding the shop at Tynecastle since the turn of the year. He has been liberated, finally, from the dead hands and second guesses of various Romanov surrogates with no command of the language, far less an understanding of the Scottish game. It seems, however, that Frail's chance has come too late. So a new coach is on the way? If so, it's the best-kept secret since Prince Harry went hunting Terry Taliban.

Hence the remonstrating voice of Foulkes. Hearts require a hands-on owner, said the former chairman. Supporters are questioning the value of their season tickets, he noted. Romanov appears to have written the season off, he added. The club, as the peer further said, perhaps superfluously, cannot afford such an attitude.

The owner's local spokesman was quick to rebut, if not quite refute, these charges. Officially, the idea that Romanov is losing interest in his Scottish investment is "unbelievable".

Let's accept, for the purposes of argument, that such is the case. So what are Hearts fans supposed to believe? They see a crisis, an emergency. They see no attempt to address the issue with any sort of urgency.

All they see, in fact, is their best player in recent times, the player who has saved the team's face repeatedly, heading off to the fjords, not pining for Tynecastle, and leaving a near-extinct parrot of a club behind him.

Why has a new manager been so hard to find? Or rather, why has there been no apparent effort made to find a new manager? Foulkes appears to be right about that, at least. When or if a new coach is acquired, he will put in an appearance only after this dismal season has reached its depressing conclusion. It seems that Romanov's reputation precedes him in coaching circles.

He was supposed to be the saviour of Hearts, remember. As well as anyone, Foulkes remembers the dire straits in which the club found itself before Romanov put in an appearance in the autumn of 2005.

Older fans can remember previous crises, the bluster of Wallace "Messiah"

Mercer, and the relegation struggles. But this is different.

This time, the money pit is forbiddingly deep. Even if Romanov is jaded, even if he is bored, even if though this seems unlikely he is prepared to admit he has made a mistake, there is no obvious escape route for the club. Ukio Bankas is not a charity, even if it has acted as such in its dealings with Hearts. In any attempted takeover the club's debts to the bank would amount to an enormous premium distorting the real worth of the assets.

To put it bluntly: no rational potential buyers are available. Either Romanov takes a hit don't hold your breath or a very rich eccentric is out there somewhere.

The trouble is, even eccentrics are rarely stupid to the tune of upwards of £50m when the only reward, in a good season, is a Uefa Cup place.

Even that dream is beyond Hearts this March. Dreams are, in fact, off the agenda for the foreseeable future. The worst of it is, Lord Foulkes is right, for once. There is no sign that the owner is remotely troubled. But as the fans tend to say, this can't go on. At Tynecastle, the definitive crisis has yet to unfold.

Taken from the Sunday Herald