Vlad the Mad? Part 2: Burley, Rix, and the question of 'interference'

So we've covered the reasons why Vladimir Romanov invested in Hearts, and what he hopes to achieve. Now it's onto the more meaty stuff: the various controversies he's been involved with during his time at Tynecastle. There's no better place to start than with George Burley: for it was his exit - together, just days later, with those of George Foulkes and Phil Anderton - with Hearts still top of the league which first got Jambos like myself worrying about the future under Romanov's command; and it also led to an abrupt change in what had previously been almost universally positive media coverage about the transformation the Lithuanian had overseen.

From very early on in Burley's brief, but astonishingly successful stewardship, a perception grew among Hearts fans that he wasn't fully committed to the job: that he would be off as soon as a bigger club came calling. In common with the vast majority of people in football, he may well have felt that what Romanov ultimately hoped to achieve was little more than a pipe-dream: that Hearts had no realistic hope of catching up and overtaking the Old Firm. With such a mindset, he probably viewed his time at Tynecastle as a mere stepping stone in order to raise his profile, and secure a job with a top Championship, or better still, Premiership club.

Of course, such a mindset would have been perfectly sensible in the years before Romanov's arrival: Hearts had tried to cling on to the Old Firm's coattails before, with disastrous consequences. But it must have been completely at odds with the ambitions of his boss, with whom his relationship quickly became more and more fractious. Briefing the press that Romanov was telling him which players to pick - as he began doing after Hearts' 3-0 win at Tannadice in August 2005 - can in hindsight be seen as Burley beginning to get his excuses in early, and laying the groundwork for his ultimate departure: his failure to move his family to Edinburgh providing more grist to the mill that his heart just wasn't in it for the long haul.

The straw that broke the camel's back, though - as it would with Foulkes and Anderton too - was Burley's belief that if Hearts were genuinely to challenge, signings of the quality made immediately following his arrival in Summer 2005 had to be continually recruited on a regular basis. In a nutshell, he wanted a short-term fix - which Hearts simply could not afford to commit themselves to. Romanov is certainly ambitious - but as explained in Part 1, his aim is to build the club up slowly and make it self-financing: otherwise, why would a successful businessman like him invest in the first place? And to make matters worse, Burley had key allies for such a strategy in Foulkes and especially Anderton, both of whom continued to boast in the press of the kinds of figures Hearts were now interested in: figures who would cost money the club simply did not have.

With the manager's strategy so wholly different from that of the majority shareholder, a parting of the ways rapidly became inevitable. Amid the uproar which followed, Foulkes resigned, and Anderton was also dismissed: the latter, both because he had failed to achieve much progress in negotiations with Edinburgh City Council (crucial to Romanov's plans to redevelop the stadium), and also as a result of wildly overspending his budget: in effect, Anderton had been the catalyst for a 'speculate to accumulate' policy which would prove ruinous if pursued in the long run. Key members of the board were pulling in totally different directions: and in any organisation, if the man at the top fails to act in such circumstances, either he or the business concerned is likely to suffer terribly as a result. Romanov's response was swift: quickly increasing his shareholding in order to have more control over boardroom decisions, and bringing in his own men. The chain of command at the club was dramatically tightened: probably because Romanov himself had been unaware as to the levels of expenditure Anderton had overseen.

All this, of course, was a public relations disaster of unmitigated proportions: Foulkes labelling Romanov a 'dictator', the media wondering what kind of madman could possibly be presiding over such utter chaos, and Hearts fans themselves suddenly realising the extent of the Faustian pact they had entered into. For if Romanov did decide to cut and run - indeed, if he was the asset stripper conspiracy theorists now made him out to be - there would be little or nothing ordinary Jambos could do about it. And Romanov himself - used to running clubs in the former Soviet Union where coaches traditionally had a far more limited shelf-life than in Britain, and little fuss was made when they and their clubs parted company - probably underestimated the furore which Burley's exit would cause. Hence, at one point, in a story broken by the Telegraph's Roddy Forsyth which was much disputed by Hearts supporters, but actually made considerable sense in the circumstances, he seriously entertained the possibility of asking Burley back: but only if the manager was far more prepared to accept his boss' advice over the kinds of signings which would be made (and especially, not to bring in the kinds of expensive purchases which Burley deemed essential to maintaining a serious title challenge). Not surprisingly, Burley wasn't interested.

So Romanov was left in a bind. With most of the UK football community now convinced that he was a megalomaniac, telling his manager what team to pick and prepared to dismiss him for no good reason, who in their right mind would be prepared to take over? For if the man who had led Hearts to their best start in 91 years could prove expendable, how could any ambitious coach worth their salt feel confident about taking up the job? In this context, the Tynecastle supremo made a disastrous blunder. Based on the hunger and desire to succeed he could 'see in his eyes', and on the strength of one mere interview, Graham Rix - whose conviction for sexual intercourse with a minor had made most clubs totally unwilling to employ him - was given the position. Much of Scottish football was outraged: and those Hearts fans who weren't disgusted by the prospect of such a man becoming manager could only note Rix' dreadful previous record in charge of Portsmouth and Oxford. The feel-good factor, which only weeks earlier had so many Jambos believing the title could be won, and had led to Romanov basking in enormous levels of popularity, had now totally vanished.

Sadly, the misgivings felt by many Jambos about the new manager would be vindicated. A hitherto fluent, confident side rapidly took on the appearance of something altogether different; and what had at one point been an enormous lead over Rangers in the battle for 2nd spot began to be rapidly whittled away. Rix' allegation - made with the club about to face, curiously enough, another trip to Tannadice - that he wasn't in control of team selection, gave the club the motive it needed to dismiss him: indeed, that the decision wasn't taken earlier was probably because of the board's reluctance to further destabilise the morale of the side.

Of course, with Rix lasting barely four months in the job, it all added more fuel to the critics' fire: 'Vlad the Impaler' had done it again. Had he not fired Rix, the likelihood is that 2nd place would have been lost, and the Scottish Cup would not currently grace the Tynecastle trophy cabinet; but a perception of a crazed Eastern European autocrat was now embedded in the consciousness of practically all non-Hearts supporters (not to mention a good few Jambos too).

On the positive side, the board appear to have learned from their mistakes: there is now a deep unwillingness to sack Valdas Ivanauskas, the current coach, unless the team's fortunes totally collapse. Romanov himself recognises the damage which last season's managerial chaos did to both player morale, and the club's profile more generally: and only a prolonged period of stability can begin to address this. Moreover, ex-CSKA Moscow coach Anatoli Korobochka, and former USSR manager Eduard Malofeev, have arrived in order to assist Ivanauskas: just as at boardroom level, Romanov's aim being to ensure that, by bringing in men he has previously worked with (Malofeev, for example, has coached at Kaunas, and worked with MTZ-Ripo's youth academy), and therefore knows he can trust, everyone at the club is pulling in the same direction.

Whoever has been in charge at the time, though - be it Burley, Rix or Ivanauskas - one accusation has continually been made: that Romanov rather fancies himself as a manager, and chronically interferes in team selection. Many Hearts supporters now accept this as almost certainly true - and take the attitude that, given how much the team's fortunes have improved thanks to his largesse, it's just a question of taking the rough with the smooth as far as the owner's tendency to meddle is concerned. Indeed, in an admission predictably portrayed by much of the media as 'Vlad: I pick the team!', Romanov recently acknowledged asking 'searching questions' of the manager when the side is picked (for example, about the fitness levels of one player over another); and Hearts have often fielded seemingly bizarre selections over the past year, in many cases apparently favouring individuals from the owner's native Lithuania over other more deserving, reliable players: not least with an eyebrow-raising XI fielded at Easter Road last Sunday.

So, is it true? Does the owner 'interfere'? In the opinion of this fan, in all probability, yes. I seriously doubt he openly insists on certain players being picked over others: he spends much of his time at home in Lithuania on other business, and is on record as stating that, given his relative lack of time spent at the training ground, he couldn't possibly possess enough expertise of players' current form to advocate one being picked over another. But there must be a serious doubt whether the manager has either the ability or confidence to out-argue his charismatic, impassioned boss whenever he raises an objection: for how could he be sure his contract wouldn't be terminated were he to continually go against the owner's apparent wishes? You might call this subconscious interference: it isn't Romanov's explicit intention, but for understandable reasons, his manager may well be too timid to stand up to him.

Moreover, it has to be said that it is almost impossible to explain some of Rix or Ivanauskas' selections in any other light - especially when part of Romanov's motivation for buying a club in Scotland in the first place was to showcase young Lithuanian players. What is he to do when some or all of these players are either out of form, or simply not up to the standard required? In such circumstances, it is not difficult to imagine Ivanauskas feeling under pressure to pick them regardless.

That said though, one other key point should be borne in mind. Romanov's aim is to win the SPL title, and qualify for the Champions League group stages, within five years of initially taking over: in other words, by 2010. But he is not interested either in a short-term fix, or achieving too much too soon: for to reach these objectives now before the club has grown sufficiently would dangerously inflate expectation levels among the supporters, lead to far higher wage and bonus demands from players, and ultimately run the risk of torpedoing the whole enterprise. This sort of success can only be pursued with a young side developed through the youth academy: for if it isn't achieved at a profit, it defeats the whole point.

Bearing that in mind, I don't think Hearts were ever that serious about reaching this season's Champions League group stages: investment in the team which would have endangered the club's long-term health would have had to have been made in the summer in order to achieve this. And similarly, I don't believe the club to be genuinely going for this season's SPL championship either: too much still needs to be changed at all levels for such success to be viable. This may well help explain the extraordinary extent of squad rotation seen already this season: the aim is to beat Rangers again to 2nd spot, rather than wresting the title from Celtic, and given such an approach, the stronger and fitter the players are kept by being regularly rested, the better. Once Hearts are truly ready to win the league, I seriously doubt we will see anything like the same disruption to the team: for while it is indeed a squad game nowadays, Ivanauskas, Malofeev and Korobochka surely understand the need for continuity in a successful team. It just may take another two or three years for such stability to be pursued as far as selecting the side is concerned.

And it has to be said: despite the chaos of last season and a worrying start to this one, despite the doubts many supporters continue to hold about Romanov, and his portrayal as a madman by much of the media, Hearts went on to achieve 2nd place and only their second trophy in 44 years last May - and are already five points clear of Rangers and once more in second this time around. The positives of Romanov taking control continue to vastly outweigh the negatives: and there is plenty more to come.

This isn't to say, though, that he doesn't continue to make bizarre comments about media and refereeing 'bias', and further add to his megalomaniacal image in so doing. So, why does he frequently behave in such a way? It's to this question which we now turn in Part 3.