Interview: Paulo Sergio, Hearts manager

By Stuart Bathgate
Published on Saturday 15 October 2011 13:10

THE timing was a surprise and so was the name. When Paulo Sergio replaced Jim Jefferies as Hearts manager just a fortnight into the season, two questions sprang to mind: Why now? Why him?

The rapidity with which Vladimir Romanov has pressed the ejector button on the Hearts hotseat has led some to suppose that his appointments are more or less random. As the weeks have passed, however, the suitability of the 43-year-old has become more apparent.

A player of modest ability, Sergio made the most of himself thanks to hard work and attention to detail. He applied a similar formula during his initial successes as a coach, ensuring that his teams were more than the sum of their parts. In his last post, with Sporting Lisbon, he fought to stay on terms with Benfica and Porto, both of whom had far bigger budgets.

Sergio's time with Sporting ended in February when he stepped down after failing to beat Rangers in the Europa League. As the club's board of directors had quit in December, leaving the business rudderless, he concluded he was on a hiding to nothing. "I felt I was killing myself there," he says now.

We are sitting in the manager's office at Tynecastle, Sergio having finally been persuaded that people are interested in what he has to say. His air of confidence may seem like pride to some, but his modesty is genuine: fluent in four languages, he is often loath to use any of them, preferring to get on with his job rather than chat about it to outsiders.

For as long as Romanov remains majority shareholder at Tynecastle, there is no chance that Sergio will be left adrift as he was by his board at Sporting. The Kaunas-based banker remains in firm control of Hearts and still yearns to get the better of the Scottish football establishment.

That was one of the relevant points, for Romanov, about Sergio's Sporting experience: his willingness to take on the richer clubs. Not that the coach is at all naive about the scale of the challenge facing him as he tries to get the better of Rangers and Celtic; he may not feel he needs to match the Old Firm pound for pound if he is to construct a Hearts team capable of winning the SPL, but he knows he will need significant investment all the same.

"I was asked when I arrived if I thought it was possible for Hearts to become champions of Scotland and I said yes," he says. "But for that we had to make a lot of things different to what we are doing today.

"We have to recognise Celtic and Rangers have all the top things you need to be able to fight for the league and trophies. We don't have that at the moment, but that doesn't mean in the future we can't have it. That depends on how much we really want it. Of course we need a lot more money and a lot of different things to fight for that.

"But meanwhile we can compete with them. We proved that in our last match and that's what we want to do."

That match, a 2-0 win for Hearts over Celtic, was the high point so far of Sergio's reign as manager. There have been lows too – the 5-0 home defeat by Tottenham Hotspur was not clever, even allowing for the quality of the opposition, and the loss in the League Cup to Ayr still rankles – but there are signs that Sergio is steadily imprinting a successful pattern on his squad.

The victory against Celtic was Hearts' fourth successive home win in the league, each of them a clean sheet. If they can come close to replicating that form on the road – they make the short trip to Dunfermline today still in search of a first away win, so at present it remains a big if – they may even be in with a shout of emulating the second-place finish they managed back in Romanov's first full season in charge, 2005-06.

As he gets on with the job of trying to construct the best team in Scotland, Sergio is convinced that Hearts already have the best fans. After that humiliation by Spurs on home turf, the manager was astonished not only by the number of supporters who made the trip to London for the return leg, but by the indomitable spirit they showed throughout the match, singing from first to last as their team got a goalless draw.

"After losing 5-0 at home against Tottenham you saw what they did at Tottenham and it was great," he says. "I am proud of them. Believe me, it is a great sensation having the support of our fans.

"I felt that gave me even more responsibility to give them compensation for what they are doing for us. I have a great desire to make them happy, because they deserve it, because they are always with us. I love the atmosphere in Scottish football a lot. The atmosphere is fantastic, at least at Tynecastle."

His assessment of the players in the SPL is similarly upbeat. Judged on their individual talents they may not be world-beaters, but together they have a defiance and a work ethic which he believes he can successfully harness.

"I think Scotland has a lot of great players. The character of a Scottish player is not like a Latin one or a Brazilian player – you don't have a lot of skilful players who can play one against one and things like that.

"But we have another kind of player who you can organise a collective game with, and you can be sure they will have the capacity to pass and shoot and a huge desire to fight and win.

"You should pick the characteristic of the player you are working with and make them believe and think collectively you can achieve your goals. I think Scotland has good players to make a good national team playing inside this country.

"I think Hearts have two or three players who can be in the national squad and I will be pleased when that day arrives. Other clubs do too.

"I don't believe just the Scottish players playing in other countries are the only ones good enough for the national team. I think we have good enough players in the SPL."

The big question, of course, is whether Sergio will be allowed to remain in charge long enough to build up a squad capable of taking on the Old Firm over the course of the season. His contract is for the length of the season, and he has so far decided against uprooting his family from their home in Lisbon. His wife Sandra and their daughters, 13-year-old Mariana and 11-year-old Joana, have moved with him from job to job up to now, and their absence saddens him.

"They are in school, but they were here with me before school started for 15 days," he says of the girls. "Now we are looking to see if they can come over during the Christmas holidays.

"Up to now, when I was a player and even when I started coaching, they went everywhere with me. This is the first year we have decided they should stay at home, because at their age it gets more difficult for them to change their friends and their schools.

"But my older one has been looking at the internet and she has seen international schools in Edinburgh. And when I call home she says she wants to come to Edinburgh with me.

"I don't know how long I will stay here. If I stay here I don't know what we will do next season. It's hard to be like this, with them in Lisbon and me here, because I miss them a lot."

He misses some old friends too, from back home: the ones with whom he formed a forcado group to engage in Portugal's version of bullfighting – far more humane, he insists, than the Spanish. "The bullfighting is done the Portuguese way. We don't kill the bull: it is forbidden in Portugal.

"In Portugal the bull comes to the arena with a guy on a horse and after that there is a group of men they call the forcados, who grab the bull.

"There are eight men who try and grab it and I was a part of that group. And I am friends even now with the guys. Once you join a group like that you never leave.

"It is a beautiful thing. It is a very old tradition in our country. I cannot say if I was good or not because I couldn't do it too many times because I was playing football and there was the chance I could get injured.

"I was lucky. I didn't get any injuries when I was doing it.

"Compared to the guys who do it all the time I was just an amateur. I was there and I would take part in bullfights with them, but I couldn't do it like they did every weekend because I was a professional footballer."

It was a wrench for Sergio to leave that way of life behind him, and, for all that he was unemployed at the time, a risk to choose Hearts as the place where he hopes to resume his progress as a coach. He admits now that the move was very much a leap in the dark, but is happy to say that almost all the surprising aspects of his new life have been pleasant ones.

"To be honest, I am surprised at some things. I didn't know as much as maybe I wanted.

"I knew I was taking a huge risk just to take a place. We came to substitute a legend of the club, that is always hard for a coach.

"That's life. One day someone will come to substitute me – that's football.

"We didn't have a pre-season, so it's very hard to work like that. I still believe the group has not a good balance.

"We have a deficit in some positions and maybe too many players in other ones. They aren't the kind of things you can change in a moment.

"I didn't know the city, I didn't know the people, and I had very good surprises.

"We in Portugal are always proud of the way we receive people and make them feel at home. Now I have to say that Scottish people are like Portuguese people.

"Everyone makes us feel at home. It's a beautiful city and I like living here.

"I just miss my girls. But I can be happy here in Edinburgh, because I came to work and I'm living in a good home with the facilities I need.

"Sometimes I like to go to play tennis with Sergio [Cruz, one of the two assistant coaches he brought with him to Scotland] to take care a little bit of my shape, and there are nice restaurants too. Nothing different to maybe if I was in Portugal just now."

The speed with which Sergio was appointed meant he had no time for detailed discussions with Romanov about their visions for the club, which has to be regarded as another risk. Ideally, Sergio would have liked to get a commitment out of Romanov to buy in a couple of players before the transfer window closed, so that he could start addressing those imbalances in the squad. But that dissatisfaction apart, he has been impressed by the club owner.

"Honestly, all the times I've been with him I think he's a very nice person. He's warm. I think he more or less understands English, but he uses a translator to make sure what he wants to say gets through. But I think he's a very nice person.

"I'm sure he's a clever one, because nobody has what he has being stupid. He's a business person.

"And I think the more good football men he has around him, the better for him, to help him to know better the business every day. I think he should have more and more football persons around him to make him understand every day better, because he's in a business that is very peculiar."

Just in case all this sounds too good to be true and Sergio is merely playing at being the perfectly polite guest in a foreign land, I invite him to nominate the worst aspect of his new life in Edinburgh. His reply, which comes almost immediately, could easily have come from a native of the capital.

"We don't have space to park our car," he says. "We are paying all the time to park.

"We are always complaining in Portugal about potholes in the streets, but here it's worse, believe me. It breaks our cars. The streets are not in very good condition.

"The buildings are beautiful. I like these historic things. In Portugal I'm always taking my kids to see old things, historic things, and when they're here they love to go and see all these places.

"But too many fines because of parking, and the streets are not good. We should improve our streets in Edinburgh."

He pauses for a moment and weighs up the pros and cons of having an enviable job working in the sport which he loves in a historic city which just happens to have a few holes in the road. "But I've nothing to complain about.," he concludes.

And that includes the weather. Those who have known nothing but Portugal's clement climate might find the Edinburgh autumn a bit much to bear, but Sergio has known far harsher conditions.

"I played a season in France, in the Alps, and in the morning when I woke up my car would be under a metre and a half of snow," he recalls of the year he spent with Grenoble. "They put salt on the streets but not the driveways, so I had to dig my car out every day.

"I have to adapt. In the winter in Portugal it's cold too, but not for so long."

Given the weather we have been having lately, of course, we could reverse that and say that in Scotland it is warm too in autumn, just not quite as warm as it is in Portugal. When Sergio had a few days' leave back home during last week's international break it was at precisely the time of year that traditionally marks the end of the summer season. He observed the usual rituals of that time of year, too, only to receive grief from his daughters when the good weather returned unexpectedly.

"It is all changing. Normally in Portugal it should be cold too by now, but it's incredible, 32 degrees yesterday. In October, it's not normal.

"When I went there last week I closed our swimming pool because summer is finished, but now my kids are complaining to me, why did I do that? It's all changing. We have to be careful with our pollution and all of that. We are making huge mistakes for the future. I think climate change is because of us."

Even if it all ends in tears for Sergio and Hearts, it is unlikely that either party will regard the marriage as a huge mistake. The manager was unemployed and stood to gain from the experience of coaching in a different football culture: the owner had grown impatient with Jefferies' results and with the team's style of play under him.

The club had more to lose if they got their choice wrong, but so far they have gained a lot. Whether they get as much as they can out of Sergio may now depend on whether Romanov backs his own judgment with some hard cash for new players.

Taken from the Scotsman