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| <-Page | <-Team | Sun 19 Nov 2006 Hearts 0 Rangers 1 | Team-> | Page-> |
| <-Srce | <-Type | Herald ------ Preview | Type-> | Srce-> |
| Eduard Malofeev | <-auth | GRAHAM SPIERS | auth-> | Douglas McDonald |
| 21 | of 120 | ----- Nacho Novo 78 | L SPL | H |
Silence that speaks volumesGRAHAM SPIERS, Chief Sportswriter November 18 2006 Many and varied are the theories about what Vladimir Romanov is trying to achieve with Hearts. The only thing everyone is agreed on is that the Lithuania-based banker cannot possibly have planned to make the club the utter mess that it currently is. At Hearts' Riccarton training complex yesterday, not for a first time, it became a theatre of the absurd. From that Tower of Babel known as the Hearts coaches' bootroom, not a single person - Lithuanian, Russian, Belarussian, whatever - emerged to talk about the club's preparations for facing Rangers tomorrow. In time, even a bored and indisposed media throng began to bicker as this charade of a day dragged on. One by one, confused and bewildered players - Ibrahim Tall, Paul Hartley, Robbie Neilson, Edgaras Jankauskas - sloped away towards their cars wondering what is next around the corner. The Edinburgh business community, meanwhile, is stirring in vain over speculation that various consortia are about to offer to buy Romanov out. With no "coach" speaking, not an Eduard Malofeev in sight, and with Valdas Ivanauskas, the Hearts head coach, still said to be consulting a Baltic quack, suddenly Steven Pressley appeared around 2pm. Immediately surrounded by journalists, TV crews and photographers, Pressley gave a decent impression of one of Romanov's throat surgeons from Vladivostok having just severed his tongue not five minutes earlier. Pressley has been axed from the Hearts team, presumably under Romanov's orders, over his public pleas for sanity around the club and remains in the dark about whether he will face Rangers. Given that Christophe Berra, the young defender, has written the captain's column in Pressley's place in tomorrow's match programme, things don't look good for Hearts' 33-year-old captain. Indeed, it must be assumed that Pressley remains stripped of all his stripes at Tynecastle. Given that Malofeev - Hearts' sixth coach in the past 18 months who is himself about to be put out to grass by Romanov - possesses no English, it had been assumed yesterday that Alex Koslovski, a Belarussian interpreter employed by the club, might appear before the media. Yet Kozlovski failed to show up, as did another character, Anatoliy Korobochka, Hearts' sporting director, as did another, Eugenijus Riabovas, a Lithuanian who is widely expected to replace Malofeev after tomorrow's game. It was reported that, not long before Kozlovski was due to take a bow before us yesterday, Romanov, in one of his gratuitous interventions, placed a call to Riccarton and ordered him not to speak. Given all this, it was hard to know why Hearts bothered staging their weekly press conference in the first place. It was left to poor Tall, a Senegalese defender who spoke in a bemused whisper, to try to bat down all enquiries. "Has it been a difficult week for the players?" "No, we just think about what happens on the pitch." "Do you think Steven Pressley will play on Sunday?" "I don't know." "Isn't this a difficult time for everyone?" "It's not a problem for the players." Yesterday the Edinburgh Evening News was wreathed in excitement about a possible offer to buy out Romanov, but the more you searched the story, the less plausible it appeared. Two businessmen, Fred Wood and Pat Munro, the latter a plumber, are said to be planning a swoop, though no-one should hold their breath. First, Wood and Munro would need to cobble together in the region of £5m merely to buy out Romanov's 80%-plus stake. Secondly, they'd need to produce some form of collateral to set against a Hearts net debt which is believed by some to be approaching £25m. And thirdly - and most importantly of all - it was relayed yesterday that Romanov is totally against selling his controlling Hearts stake in the first place. "No offer has been received by Romanov, and it won't be welcomed because he has no interest in selling the club," said a spokesman for Romanov. "There is no prospect of Vladimir walking away from this because he is committed to making a success of the whole project. He doesn't want to be deflected from his goal." And, pray … what goal precisely is this? The fog, the confusion and the wilful mismanagement of Hearts has become an embarrassment. You look back at the appointments and fates of such men as George Burley, Graham Rix, Ivanauskas, and now this cat's cradle of eastern Europeans, and see a proud Scottish football club being lampooned and ridiculed in the hands of a martinet. It must dismay those Hearts fans who had bought into the Romanov dream and have chanted his name in good faith. Meanwhile, the Hearts owner is said to be set to make one of his Pope-like appearances in Edinburgh: too late, it would seem, to take in tomorrow's game at Tynecastle, but in time to hold talks with baffled club officials later in the week before taking in the Inverness Caley Thistle-Hearts game next weekend. One hopes that Romanov is genuine in his plans for Hearts. It is also to be hoped that he wants to restore stability to the coaching of the team, and dignity to the club, and clarity to supporters who feel dismayed by what is going on. The thing is, if Romanov does wish for all these things, he has a strange way of showing it.  Taken from the Herald |
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