Interview: ‘There’s nothing I miss about playing’ - Paul Hartley, Alloa manager and former Scotland international

By AIDAN SMITH
Published on Saturday 3 November 2012 00:00

TODAY’S assignment, should I choose to accept it, is to spend an hour in the company of a player who I’ll never forgive for shattering a dream.

A semi-final hat-trick for his team did for my team and what now looks like their best chance in a generation of winning the Scottish Cup as only Gretna stood in the way. There will be car issues and weather issues and I virtually have to aquaplane across the Clackmannanshire Bridge with dodgy brake lights. But, you know, I’ve had worse days (April Fools’ Day, 2006). And in the perverse way of all football fans, I’m almost looking forward to meeting Paul Hartley by the time I finally splash down in Alloa. I want to know how he did it.

By “it” I don’t mean score three goals at Hampden on April Fools’ Day, 2006. I mean his transformation from, well, I was going to say caterpillar to butterfly but butterfly would be a kind description of what he was like at Hibernian. An unkind description would be: flouncing winger, ineffectual, not very brave, bit of a jessie. At Hearts, though, he suddenly became the best midfielder in the land: hard, strong, full of cunning and running and with a swagger to the hips that induced staggers among the Hibs, almost every time the Edinburgh rivals clashed.

Like John Greig and Kenny Dalglish, Hartley carried one of Scottish football’s most prominent and effective backsides as a player and now I’m walking behind it as Alloa Athletic’s trendy young manager strikes out for the nearest coffee shop. He’s wearing expensive-looking brown suede shoes completely impractical for the town’s rain-lashed streets. The footwear, among other things, suggests he won’t be at Recreation Park for long, that he’s destined for a bigger stage.

“I’ve got a job, I’ve got a start,” he tells me. “If folk reckon they always thought I’d be in management, well, far better players than me never really succeeded at it so there are no guarantees. I’m only 18 months into it so it’s still quite new. It’s going okay so far and maybe I’m under the radar a bit here in terms of expectations. But I think I’m still expected to get results. And one of the things we know about management is that it can change quickly. If you don’t get results that job might not be yours for much longer.”

Hartley, who sips Diet Coke in preference to an elaborate coffee, is unfussy, uncomplicated. Quite common in our game, a Man of Lanarkshire and Few Words. He’s also unsentimental and unfazed; for instance by today’s trip to Ibrox in the Scottish Cup. “When I came here we’d just been relegated to the Third Division. We had no players and in just three months I’d signed 20. We won the league by 14 points and are clear second in the Second right now but this will be my biggest test so far as manager, the 
biggest exposure I’ll have had in the 
biggest arena.

“I don’t know if a lot of my players have been to Ibrox let alone played there so I don’t know how they’ll react. It’s my job to get them nice and relaxed but also completely focused. What managers usually say on days like these is ‘Enjoy it, don’t let it pass you by’ but how do you enjoy a game? By performing well. That’s the first thing you should do, then enjoyment might follow.” Forget about shirt-swaps and photo-ops, texts and tweets – this won’t be a jolly holiday.

Ah, but not every player possesses the mental toughness Hartley did with Hearts, Celtic and Scotland (25 caps), especially down the divisions. “I know what I’m working with,” he says of his part-time squad, before going on to praise their commitment at training Tuesdays and Thursdays having already done a day’s work. “We’ve got guys who work in bars, in clothes shops and helping disadvantaged kids – the usual mix.” But he still expects. “I’m trying to make them successful. I know they have other jobs, but this is a job, too. They play 
football, which must be the best job there is.” (Careful, Paul, you’re almost 
getting sentimental).

Hartley today is also unbearded. “Just shaved it off yesterday. I was getting sick of it.” Nothing to do with the ye olde no-beards Ibrox ruling, then, and nothing to do with superstition. “I can’t stand all that left-shinpad-first rubbish.” He says he doesn’t miss the dressing-room banter. “I played the game and was grateful for the chance but my time is over. Ex-players can try and do a few different things: coaching, the media, business ventures. I just thought that maybe I’d learned a few things from some really good managers and could make use of them. I came here as a player-manager but have never laced up the boots. Right away doing both jobs just seemed too difficult. I remember Archie Knox saying that about being player-manager at Forfar and just the other week when we played Ayr Mark Roberts told me he found combining the two really tough. The boots don’t even go on at training. I still get to enjoy the excitement of the dressing-room but can honestly say there’s nothing I miss about playing. When I stopped I’d really had enough.”

See: unsentimental. So where does Hartley, who’s 36, get his steely single-mindedness? Maybe we have to go back to Hamilton, where he was born and where he still calls home. The second-youngest of six, he was brought up by his mother Ann but right away stresses that he doesn’t want his family situation over-dramatised. “I’m not here to feel sorry for myself. My parents split up but that happens to tens of thousands of kids. My dad was out of my life and it fell to my mum to raise the six of us. It was a tough upbringing in a tough environment 
but, personally, I think it was the making of me.

“All I wanted to do was play football. There was a wee pitch across from the house and I was out there morning, noon and night. I played under-eights for Mill United with Barry Ferguson and now my youngest, Regan, is in the team. I tell my sons to play as much football as they can because I don’t think Scottish kids do it enough anymore. That’s a pet hate of mine and when we ask ourselves why the game is struggling right now we should bear it in mind.

“So we didn’t have a silver spoon and it must have been hard for my mum but somehow I got the boots and I got the strips which were all I ever wanted as a kid. She’s followed my entire career and still comes to every game. At Alloa we pull in between 450 and 500 so you hear every shout and I’ve had to tell her not to bother if her laddie’s getting a slagging. She’s always been encouraging without being full of opinions and I’ve been grateful for that. Parents these days are probably too much of an influence on their boys’ careers; I see that at my club. Once I knew it was football for me I was left to get on with things and that made me focused and determined. I don’t think I missed the father-figure because I’ve always had my mum. And you should see her house: everything I’ve done in the game is represented on the walls. It’s like a shrine and pretty embarrassing for me, which I’m always teasing her about. You’d think she only had the one boy!”

It was Billy Stark when Hartley was at St Johnstone who suggested he come in from the right wing and try midfield. Does he thank his old boss for this every time they meet? No, and maybe he should, but while history proves it was a good idea, the player in such situations still has to “do it for himself”. By the same rule, he doesn’t blame his Hibs manager, Alex McLeish, for the Easter Road experience being so “terrible”. He simply didn’t play well in green and white. “Not everyone gets a second chance, to go again, but I did and I’m grateful for that.”

So are the Hearts fans who like to reminisce about the first full season of the Vladimir Romanov era, the blazing start made under George Burley which ended so abruptly, the Scottish Cup success but also what might have been. Hartley doesn’t do this. Don’t get him wrong, he loved his time at Hearts, “a magnificent club”. But in the SPL plenty of challenges have faded with the leaves turning brown. “I remember being on pre-season tour in Ireland and thinking: ‘We hardly have a team.’ Then they started arriving, the Skacels, the Bednars, the Brelliers, the Pospisils and we were like: ‘They’ll do.’ But there were no guarantees we would have won the league if everything, George included, had stayed intact. We still had a good season, splitting the Old Firm and winning the cup. More than that, you just don’t know.”

Famously, at what they perceived to be Hearts’ moment of least intactness, the “Riccarton Three” of Hartley, Steven Pressley and Craig Gordon made their protest against Romanov’s methods. “Folk were probably surprised we did that,” says our man with typical understatement, “but we had to take a stand.” Instability at Tynecastle has, if anything, got worse. “We never had the problem of wages not being paid and I think the punters, even though they’ve since won the cup again, are fed up now. They 
were terrific when I was there and still are, and they deserve a stable club with a sound future.”

All that said, Hartley the born-again midfielder “never had a problem personally with Mr Romanov” and despite the manager’s office having a revolving-door, “we were professionals, getting paid well, so we did the job on the park.” Is he still bound by a confidentiality clause? “A bit.” Will he ever tell the story of the day the Lithuanian circus came to Gorgie? “Maybe. There’s definitely a book in it.” What does he take from the experience into his own management? “That having 70 players on your books is perhaps a few too many!” So what would he do at Alloa if confronted by a revolt, indeed the Recreation Three? “That’s a naughty one!”

Hearts, with Hartley rampant, invariably “did the job” against Hibs, and three times in 2005-06 derbies they netted four goals. Hibs, under Tony Mowbray, won the ideological argument but when it really mattered Hearts would win the game. Hartley smiles at the memory of those clashes. “Hibs had some good players, your Browns and Thomsons and Whittakers, but we could play football too and we could also roll our sleeves up.” Hearts prided themselves on their “tremendous energy” and Hartley has been delighted to bring his old Tynecastle fitness coach Tom Ritchie to Alloa – “my best signing”.

He reckons, given his underwhelming performances for Hibs, that the Easter Road faithful must have been “shocked” by the transformation in his play. The fans reacted in the usual way, with torrents of abuse. “Never bothered me,” he says. And the aggro of confrontations with the likes of Ivan Sproule and Scott Brown was forgotten when they later became his team-mates, at Bristol City and Celtic respectively. “Sprouler’s a fiery character but a great lad and Broony, playing against him, was definitely one of those guys you’d cheerfully punch – but we’ve just had our sportsman’s dinner at Alloa and he was brilliant, firing off signed shirts and boots for us.”

Hartley was 28 when he made his Scotland debut, in the San Siro against Italy, and 30 when he got the chance to join boyhood heroes Celtic. “I went as just another player at Celtic Park, and there were lots of good ones there already. Plenty of good ones go there and can’t handle it; you need a strong mentality.” Hartley demonstrated his and, as well as lining up against the likes of Manchester United in the Champions League, was an important member of the team which clinched the 2007-08 SPL title with a 
seven-win finish.

These honours, on top the cup success with Hearts, prove that there are second acts in Scottish football lives. For his third act as a manager Hartley says he’s had good teachers in Walter Smith and Gordon Strachan, although you sense he’s going to be his own man about it. Now he’s got to go – some of his players are being rolled out for the media today and he needs to caution them about being too quick with the bold quote about what Alloa might do to Rangers – and I don’t get to ask him to talk me through his April Fools’ Day hat-trick.

Phew. But maybe, not wanting to 
appear sentimental, he’d have declined.

Taken from the Scotsman