Ian Cathro talks for the first time about his rocky reign at Hearts

‘I broke my own rules. I won’t blame anyone else. I have come off the tracks, slowed down and reflected. I am happy and excited about the future...’

SCENES from a life less ordinary. The boy leaves his home in the Dundee cul-de-sac to be the first on the patch of grass with a ball and is always the last to leave.

The 15-year-old takes a school project and turns it into a soccer school that will produce two of Scotland’s most intriguing prospects.

The 18-year-old heads home early from a Friday night out with mates, believing this gives him an advantage over other coaches who will be staying out to enjoy themselves.

At 22, he is approached by Guillem Balague, of TV fame, and Gaizka Mendieta, of Valencia fame. He is asked if he wants to head their coaching team at a plan to revive a Spanish lower-league team.

‘I was too green. I wasn’t quite ready to leave home,’ says Ian Cathro. He had been recommended by Andre Villas-Boas, then manager of Porto, whom he had met through an introduction from the SFA’s Jim Fleeting.

The location switches to Largs, where Cathro meets Nuno Espirito Santo (now Wolves manager) on a coaching course.

‘I did something different and Nino was marching towards me,’ adds the Scot. ‘He said that’s really interesting. Let’s talk. The very first conversation was remarkably honest, direct. He would tell me things to my face that people in our culture would say behind my back.’

There are more conversations as Nuno recruits Cathro to Rio Ave in Portugal and then Valencia. There is success at both clubs. The Scot moves to Newcastle to work with Steve McClaren and then Rafa Benitez. He is not yet 30.

And then there is Heart of Midlothian. He is named head coach in December 2016, sacked the following August. There is a temptation to believe the cascade of football scenes ends with a young man leaving the game he loves bruised and bewildered. It should be resisted.

There is no fade to black, rather a future of bright promise. Cathro will be back at work next season in England or in Europe.

He is ready for new scenes. Cathro and football, after all, is a love story. The Heart-rending leaves no bitterness, only a resolution to stick by principles formed over years in the boy who coached his school friends, the adventurer who prospered on foreign fields.

‘I went against what I believed. I will never do that again,’ he says of accepting the position of head coach at Hearts. ‘My conditions for my first job as a head coach were, first, to start in pre-season and, second, bring my own staff.’

‘Neither was met. It was a decision contrary to what I had set out in my mind.

‘The process is always about putting yourself in the situation that gives you the most chance of success. I found myself with a proposal that came quickly. The whole thing occurred over a couple of days. It was a combination of a bit of impatience and a touch of naivety on my part. I broke my rules.’

He adds: ‘I probably didn’t speak to enough people who would have given me the alternative view. For those two days, I really had only conversations with people who wanted me to take it or who I knew would be positive about it.

‘On reflection, I am disappointed in myself for those couple of days. But you grow, you become stronger, you move forward, you get better. I am glad that having lived through it, I have reached the clarity I now have.’

He eschews recrimination of any others. ‘I won’t blame anyone else. I have no intention of ever doing that. That won’t help me do what I want to do. I don’t have any negative feelings towards anyone at the club,’ he insists.

The scene is now an Edinburgh restaurant where Cathro talks passionately about football. The film metaphor is extended by a gradual realisation that he was in the wrong movie at Hearts.

There is a perception that Cathro was isolated at Tynecastle. His football philosophy is laced with more than a touch of romance and he may have felt alone in a culture of pragmatism. He does not say any of this, restricting himself to this observation: ‘Football is hard. Losing is tough and it is even more difficult if you are the only guy in the room who thinks the way you think. You are in the wrong room. I put me in the wrong room.

‘I don’t blame Craig (Levein) or Ann (Budge) or whoever else. I take responsibility for the decisions I make in my life or in my career.’

Cast ludicrously as a nerd with a laptop, he is also measured about the criticism he received from those such as Kris Boyd, who claimed Cathro had no personality and could not command respect in the dressing room.

Cathro does not identify his critics by name, but says: ‘It’s curious that someone who leaves everything that is normal to him, learns two different languages, works in a good league in Portugal, then goes on to a monster club at Valencia to be part of success there, works at what is called the best league in the world… to think somebody who does that has no personality or leadership qualities or the ability to communicate or gain respect — surely that says more about the people who hold that view than about me.’

On the relationship with players, he says: ‘£10 a week or £15million a year, win or lose, training session or match day, if a player believes that what you are saying makes sense, can help the team and help him be better for the team and for himself, then that’s it.

‘They will decide whether they value you or not. I have never felt that has not been the case. I never worried about it.’

The last sentence is the most revealing. Cathro is nobody’s victim. He has been buoyed by a belief in what he does, what he seeks to achieve.

How else could the schoolboy organise a training session that would include future stars such as Ryan Gauld or John Souttar? How else could a 20-something discuss football ideas with Nuno, Benitez or Villas-Boas?

‘I could not go to Walter Smith and pretend I know more about football than he does. But I know more about my football than Walter Smith knows about my football,’ he adds.

So what is Cathro’s game? He explains: ‘As far back as the school classes, it wasn’t come here and you’ll get better at football. It was come here and you will learn my way. If you like it, great. You will get better in a specific way. You will not get better in every way because I don’t care about every way in football. There is a way of loving football and I can transmit that. But not in other ways. I am not interested in other ways.’

The philosophy can be crudely summarised by the motto on his school coaching class: ‘Master the ball, master the game’.

‘It is about thinking about the game,’ he says. He came up with possession drills, scenarios that stressed the need to stay in space, to find angles, to dull, even neutralise physical force.

The basic tenets did not change as he moved from St John’s, Dundee, to Rio Ave in Portugal or to La Liga or the Premier League.

‘I was always watching or thinking about football,’ he admits. ‘I’d draw up training sessions and put them in notebooks. I’d scrutinise the game through my eyes. No one could tell me it was all right to lob the ball up the front. I don’t accept it now. I didn’t accept it then.

‘People thought: “Who is this guy?”. I didn’t care, don’t care. I don’t proclaim my way is better. It is just that I am so disinterested in the other way that I don’t waste time on it. I want to come up with ideas that support my way. That’s why I devote so much time to it.’

Cathro relishes talking about his love for the game. ‘Every coach will have something that gives them the most inspiration, the most joy,’ he says. ‘Where I stand on that will never change. Having the ball, seeing your opponent need to drop back, stopping a team being able to press you, locking them in. The feeling that the ball is ours. I would get a physical feeling of joy.’

He has devoted most of a short life to the game. He ran up debts on his credit card to visit Porto regularly and watch Villas-Boas work. He has tested his mental strength by heading to a country to coach with not one word of the native language.

‘When Nuno became a head coach and asked me over the phone to join him, it was a case of: “Right, pack the bag”, he says of his appointment at Rio Ave.

‘The first couple of days in Portugal were testing. I didn’t speak the language and there was a moment when I asked: “Can I manage this?”. But once there was a ball moving, I knew I could do it.’

It all comes back to an attachment that owes little to attracting fame, less to accumulating a fortune.

‘I didn’t really want to go into the professional game. But the boys became older and Dundee United wanted to bring them and me into their new academy,’ he says.

The recent past has strengthened him. ‘I am thankful circumstances have given me this time. I have come off the tracks, slowed down and reflected. I am happy and excited about the future,’ adds Cathro.

He still has the notebooks on which he committed his football ideas as a teenager.

He says: ‘I go back to them on the dark days because it brings back the love I have about football.’

There will be more drama in Cathro’s life. Only a fool would dismiss a happy ending.