If mad Vlad had got his way Hearts would have played in yellow and green instead of maroon
FOR David Southern, choosing a favourite Vladimir Romanov anecdote is like asking Coleen Rooney to find the snitch in the camp. It takes time and careful thought.
As managing director of Hearts, he met the infamous Tynecastle owner a dozen times over a nine-year period and every encounter left an impression.
One of them, on the 13th floor of the Kaunas HQ of Romanov’s Ukio Bankas, brought him face to face with part of a nuclear submarine while sipping rocket fuel at 11.15 in the morning. Another threatened to silence the
Hearts Song once and for all by suggesting the talk o’ the toon should no longer be the boys in maroon. Had Romanov had his way, they’d have been playing Rangers this Sunday in green-and-yellow kits instead.
‘After one game at Tynecastle, I walked past the door of Ali Russell, the commercial director,’ Southern tells Sportsmail in his first interview since leaving Dundee United in June. ‘He called me in and showed me a photo of FBK Kaunas celebrating a championship win in Lithuania and asked me: “What do you think of the new Hearts colours?”
‘I burst out laughing. They were wearing yellow tops, green shorts and yellow socks. Ali said to me: “I’m not joking, that’s what Vladimir wants Hearts to wear from now on”.’
The story is told with affection rather than rancour by a man who first dipped a toe in Scottish football with the sponsorship deal which persuaded Inverness Caledonian to bury the hatchet and merge with Inverness Thistle.
Moving to David Murray’s Carnegie sports management firm, he took charge of the controlled chaos when Paul Gascoigne moved to Rangers for £4.3million in 1995.
TRAIneD in crisis management, Southern became an old hand in the art of dealing with wealthy men with big egos. ‘Issues management was one of my disciplines and it served me well for Hearts, very well indeed,’ he recalls. ‘It taught me to keep calm on the days when everyone else was running around with their hair on fire.’
Or, for that matter, the days when the Lithuanian owner wanted to change the club colours from maroon to match the green of their city rivals Hibernian.
‘I don’t want to give oxygen to the idea of Vladimir being some madcap dictator,’ adds Southern. ‘He absolutely wasn’t. But embedded within him was a Lithuanian culture. He had this deep affinity with his homeland and we had to explain that our affinity with the club history was just as strong and that meant sticking with maroon and white.
‘The debate raged back and forth for 20 minutes via the owner’s right-hand man and translator Sergejus Fedotovas.
‘We told them diplomatically: “Our greatest rivals wear this as their colours”.
‘Through Sergei, Vladimir said: “We don’t consider Hibernian as rivals”.
‘His red button was always the Old Firm so we said quickly: “no, we’re not talking about Hibs here either. Celtic wear these colours and you wouldn’t want to wear the same colours as your biggest rivals”.
‘It was only when we pointed out that the move would lead to no Hearts fan ever buying anything ever again, and the fact we would lose a lot of money, that the conversation quietly moved on. The subject was never mentioned again.’ This Is Our Story by edinburgh MP and lifelong Jambo Ian Murray is a book charting the rise and fall of Romanov’s Hearts over a remarkable eight-year period. It was a reign that included two Scottish Cup triumphs, Lithuanian strikers on £10,000 a week, a Champions League qualifier, a global financial crash, tax demands from HMRC and, eventually, the threat of extinction. ‘It was the best of times and the worst of times,’ says Southern. ‘I know someone else has the copyright on that line, but Charles Dickens could have been writing about Vladimir Romanov’s Hearts.’ Where others portray a Vlad the Impaler figure sucking the life — and the assets — from an edinburgh institution, Southern recalls a complex man of light and shade. A personable, temperamental banker who engineered the club’s famous 5-1 win over Hibs in a cup final, a rendering of Zadok The Priest across Tynecastle, and large snifters before midday. ‘Vladimir was very personable. Business was his thing, but he was a very good host,’ says Southern (left). ‘One minute you were in the boardroom on the 13th floor of his head office. The next, you were in the gym on the ground floor with parquet flooring watching him shoot basketball hoops. ‘There was a surreal time when I went over to Lithuania with the manager Jim Jefferies to secure some funding for players. He (Romanov) suddenly stopped the meeting and took us up to the 13th floor to show us a view over the city and a metal chunk of about six feet by four feet of the K-19 nuclear submarine he had purchased for his balcony.
‘He then took us back in to see his massive set of bookshelves where he said: “Let me show you my favourite book”.
‘He pressed a panel in the bookshelves and it opened to reveal a book, a thick tome. And he opened it to bring out a bottle of brandy. It was 11.15 in the morning and the measures were generous.
‘It wasn’t really my drink, but at that moment in time? Me and Jim looked at each other and could barely see through the tears in our eyes caused by the ferocious alcohol content of this brandy.’
THOSe who were long-serving subjects in the court of King Vlad, where ego and megalomania ran riot, identified diplomacy and cunning as the key to survival.
Former director Liutauras Varanavicius once told Sportsmail of the elaborate measures that he, Fedotovas and sporting director Anatoly Korobochka would take to prevent the owner’s weekly fax ‘suggesting’ the team for the next game arriving on the desk of the first-team coach.
After a pre-season defeat by Southampton, rumour has it that Korobochka received a furious call from Lithuania demanding an explanation for his failure to send a report on the game through to the owner.
‘Vladimir,’ said Korobochka, ‘you sacked me weeks ago…’
Charged with stopping the water gushing in after years of lavish, unsustainable spending, Southern learned to live with the interference. The real worries began when the tinkering and calls from Lithuania slowed to a trickle.
At one stage, the playing squad consisted of 72 players.
‘There were not enough seats in the dressing rooms for all these players,’ says Southern. ‘When Campbell Ogilvie was MD before me, he and I went to Lithuania to ask for additional funding. The finance director Stewart Fraser couldn’t come with us because he had to be on site to deal with Sheriff Officers coming to the club. The cutting-costs aspect of football didn’t seem to resonate with the regime at all.’
By the end of 2012, the club was £40million in debt and hopelessly insolvent. Presented with a £450,000 bill from HMRC for non-payment of tax on wages, there was also a winding up order from the taxman for unpaid tax of £1.75m.
Warning that a game against St Mirren could be their last, Southern penned an emotionally-charged statement revealing that the club were entering the final days of their existence unless fans came forward with cash.
Statements featuring evidence of independent thought usually came back from Lithuania heavily marked with red
“We pointed out the move would lead to no Hearts fan ever buying anything ever again”
pen lines and alternative suggestions. Not this time.
‘There was actually a line added to strengthen the appeal,’ he recalls. ‘That was when I knew this was it. We were on our own now.’
Between November 2012 and June 2013, when administration became unavoidable, Southern worked with a skeleton staff to keep Hearts pumping.
‘We had become paramedics. We had to keep the club alive long enough for the administrators to come in with scalpels,’ he added.
‘There were occasions when I sat in my office with other senior managers on a Friday afternoon. We didn’t know if we had a game on the next day at Tynecastle.
‘Police needed paid, stewards needed paid and we broke credit limit after credit limit. Literally 24 hours before games, we didn’t know if they would go ahead or not.’
JourNaLISTS covering the day of administration in July 2013 felt like vultures picking on the bones of a carcass. Fourteen ancillary staff and four players lost their jobs.
Thirteen times in three years, some players had been paid late. Nine times over the same period, members of staff had woken up on pay day to find no money in the bank. For some, the ‘thank you’ for years of loyal service came in the bitter form of a P45.
‘That was horrible,’ says Southern. ‘There were a few tough days and that was the worst of the lot. It was horrific and will stay with me the rest of my life.’
The supporters answered the call in the end. rallied by the efforts of Foundation of Hearts, they came together in a way fans of bigger clubs such as rangers never could. The teams meet on Sunday at Tynecastle with Hearts in a tricky situation on the pitch. The lessons of 2012-13 show that all things are relative.
‘There’s irony in protests going on outside this spanking new £18million main stand after everything the club went through in the old one,’ notes Southern.
‘But I understand how the fans feel. It’s right that people are asking questions because the club has never been in a better position off the field than it is right now.’
This Is Our Story: How The Fans Kept Their Hearts Beating, by Ian Murray, is published by Luath (price £14.99).