Mild at Heart

CONSIDERING HIS time at Hearts was stressful enough to cause a month's absence from his workplace, Valdas Ivanauskas seems remarkably well disposed to the place these days.

The Lithuanian - who boasts the not inconsiderable achievement of lifting the Scottish Cup and breaking the Old Firm's stranglehold on the Champions League places - is back in his native country acting as interim coach for their under-18 side. It is to be hoped that when his next permanent job arrives it will offer more stability than the previous two. Remarkably, Ivanauskas's most recent coaching role, at lower division German side FC Carl Zeiss Jena, proved to be even more short-lived and turbulent than his time at Tynecastle.

Things seemed rosy enough when Ivanauskas was appointed Frank Neubath's successor just four matches into the last campaign at a club who had been a big noise in East Germany during the 1970s and '80s but had struggled to adapt since reunification. Not least because the prospect was also on the table of a 25 million investment from two potential Russian backers, Murat Lujanov and Atlan Tchichkanov of Alpha Group Investment Corporation.
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But the German league's rules on ownership - which prevent any individual owning more than 49% of any club - and the suspicious local members, put paid to that.

Ivanuaskas managed to win just one league match before he was sacked last Christmas, and even that move was unable to prevent them dropping back to the third tier of the German league structure.

"Things were difficult at Carl Zeiss Jena," Ivanauskas said. "It is a small club, and a traditional club, and it was still a very big experience for me to be a manager in Germany, because football is the No 1 thing over there. There was some very interesting things happening from the Russian side but the rules are different in Germany to what they are in Great Britain. The people from the Russian side then said they could not go to Germany so there was a problem.

"It was very difficult to bring in new players and a new structure. They couldn't implement my ideas and what I wanted. And in the end I went."

In contrast to such travails, Ivanauskas's spell in Scotland seems like a cakewalk. It may disappoint close observers of the Edinburgh football scene to relate that the 40-year-old, who was briefly retained in a director of football capacity across all three of Romanov's clubs, Hearts, FBK Kaunas, and MTZ-Ripo Minsk of Belarus, even after he became one of his countryman's statistics, has little but warm memories of his time at Tynecastle. Not only does he rate his 12 months there as the best managerial time of his life, and credits them with improving him as a manager, he insists that Vladimir Romanov remains the perfect man to be in charge of Hearts, and Csaba Laszlo, with whom he did his Uefa Pro Licence in Cologne, a manager capable of turning things around.

Hearts players largely regarded Ivanauskas as a good football man and a safe pair of hands, but unable or unwilling to control indiscipline in the dressing room. Craig Gordon relates one episode which summed up his time, when Edgaras Jankauskas was allowed to walk out of a team meeting, much to the chagrin of Steven Pressley. But Ivanauskas makes light of such issues.

"My time at Hearts was the best managerial time in my life," he said. "To win the Scottish Cup and get second place in the league was a big success for me and also for the club. The next season was very difficult, with a lot of our main players going to other clubs. We had lots of sales, new players came in and the team was still good, but for the manager it became a very big stress. I am still a young manager and I think my time at Hearts was a big experience for me," he added. "Every game was a big stress. There was the SPL, Champions League places, Scottish Cup, but people thought every match looked easy. I had a small problem back then, but now I regard it as a big experience for the future, which makes it not so frustrating."

Neither are there recriminations regarding his complex relationship with Romanov, who has now sacked him from both FBK Kaunas and Hearts.

"My relationship with Mr Romanov was a normal relationship," Ivanauskas said. "He is a big president, and is clearly very important for Hearts. You see it often in Europe and the world. For him, Hearts is his baby, so for me everything was normal.

"From my side it was a perfect relationship, because I knew him for four years before I started working at Hearts, when I was working at Kaunas. I have my own opinions about Mr Romanov and in my opinion Mr Romanov is still the perfect man for Heart of Midlothian Football club and the perfect man for Scottish football. I don't know what the fans are saying now."

The same applies to Laszlo, who he thinks deserves patience from the fans and owners. "I think 100% he is the man for the job. I know Laszlo - football for him is life, he is very emotional about it, just like me," Ivanauskas said. "It will take time for him to put his ideas into practice and show exactly what he wants. I think Laszlo is a good manager and is perfect for Hearts.

"He started the season really well, with three wins, and one loss, and everything was OK then," he added. "The last few results have not been so good but the team is not playing bad football."

Even aside from the Scottish Cup win itself, there remains plenty for Ivanauskas to be rightly proud of. Not least the progress of Andy Driver and Christophe Berra, both of whom he introduced to the Tynecastle first team, and both of whom are attracting interest from clubs elsewhere.

"He Driver has become one of the leaders at the team, and he has a big future," Ivanauskas said. "I know him very well, he was a young boy when we put him in the team at first, and now he is one of the best players at Hearts. But there is not only Driver, you think also about Lee Wallace and Christophe Berra, who is now a national team player. So I am very happy for these young players, for Christophe to be a national team player at the age of 22 is fantastic. It is all down to hard work for them.

"The team is very young and has good prospects for the future, even if now is not so easy."

Taken from the Sunday Herald