'I got on with Vlad but I'd wonder if he was thick as mince'

The man who triggered the downfall of Hearts is Vladimir Romanov – and Michael Stewart is still trying to work him out.

Stewart knew Romanov, got on well with him, played under him, and was his captain. But did he "get" him?

"Nope," he says. "And when I saw the way Vlad and his crew went about things at Tynecastle I used to think, 'how on God's earth have you guys made any money?' They did have money – lots of it – at one point. But they were senseless at Hearts."

Stewart is given to talking tartly of Hearts and the Romanov era. The former captain grew up a fan of the club and played under the Romanov regime for three years. But now, just like the Edinburgh club's administrator Bryan Jackson, he sees carnage everywhere. Stewart walked back into Tynecastle in 2007 – having previously played for the club on loan from Manchester United before a two-year spell at Hibernian – only to be met by "an utter shambles". Ever since, he has wondered what flawed motive the Russian-born Lithuanian might have had before the rafters caved in.

"I've thought about it a lot, what the grand plan was for Vlad," he says. "But I ain't discovered it. I cannot fathom Romanov and Hearts at all. It makes no sense what he was trying to achieve, or the way he went about it. You try to apply reason to it, but there is no reason to be applied. I've heard it said that Vlad early on was trying to bring in a load of Lithuanians to Hearts, to sell on for good money. Hearts was to be the shop window. But the vast majority of Lithuanians he brought to the club were p***, they were utter sh***. There was no way they were going to command sell-on fees.

"I used to sometimes look at Vlad and his gang and think: 'Are you guys actually as thick as mince? Do you know what you are doing?' They had clearly made money – somehow, somewhere – yet at Hearts they applied no business sense whatsoever. Look at the club now."

Long before the money started running out sometime in 2009/10, Stewart wearily observed the nonsensical operations at Hearts. Romanov definitely had passion but it erupted like a Catherine Wheel. Stewart and the rest of the squad played through a period when, we now know, the club was set on a calamitous path.

"The first season I went back it was an utter joke," he recalls. "We had a talented squad but we didn't really have a manager. There was Anatoly Korobochka, but he was the director of football. Then there was 'Shaggy' [Stevie Frail] who took the training – a good guy, a good coach, but not the manager. There were other guys, like that Bulgarian bloke [Angel Chervenkov], hanging around. There was this complete mismanagement of the club on every level. Then the point came when the first wage packets were delayed. To be honest, it didn't really bother me much – I knew it was coming. But, looking back, that was a sign of things going wrong."

For Stewart, the Romanov years had one period of relative sanity: when Csaba Laszlo – himself a bit off the wall – was installed as manager. The club finished third in 2008/09 and played good football in front of decent crowds at Tynecastle. But the Romanov lunacy meant it could not be prolonged; Laszlo was soon out on his ear.

"When Csaba came in – brought by Romanov – it worked well for a period," Stewart says. "We had a good season under him, he was a really good manager. I feel that the Csaba Laszlo period should have shown Romanov and Hearts the importance of having a good management system in place, at every level. But Vlad didn't take heed. There was a lack of leadership at the top at Hearts. There was incompetence. The club was a headless chicken. It would all unravel."

Typical, says Stewart, was the time in August 2008 when Hearts were due to play Rangers at Ibrox, and a stiff-faced Laszlo asked a few senior players for a word before boarding the team bus for Glasgow. "We got into his office and Csaba says, 'Vlad has been on the phone – I've not to pick Banksy [goalkeeper Steve Banks].' There was some dispute going on at the time between Banksy and the club, and Vlad had ordered that he couldn't play.

"At this stage Marian Kello had just turned up at the club – we knew next to nothing about him. Csaba said to us: 'I've been told not to pick Banksy . . . so who would you feel more comfortable with in goal, Marian or Jamie MacDonald?' We said, 'we don't know, Csaba, we don't know anything about Marian.' That's how mad it all was.

"I always got on well with Vlad. He came on pre-season, he was fun, he chatted. When I became captain he would sometimes want a chat. But there was too little substance about him at Hearts. And, as he began to lose interest or whatever, there was this growing ill-feeling at the club."

To this day Stewart maintains that Hearts could be thriving under Romanov, rather than twitching on its death bed. Romanov, he believes, had the time and the money to set a structure in place, to vouchsafe Hearts' future. But he was too headstrong, too cavalier, too erratic.

"It is the one charge I will always make against Vlad – that he could really have made something of Hearts, if he had invested properly. He could have created something sustainable, because he had the wealth at one point. Hearts could have been laughing right now under Vlad's leadership and vision, but instead, you were left shaking your head at the mad way he went about things. It was sheer lunacy."

Taken from the Herald