High-profile boss worth paying for, says Budge

● Admitting she has made mistakes, Hearts owner Ann Budge has also been irritated by ill-informed comments

Hearts owner Ann Budge has insisted “finance is not a problem” as the Tynecastle club begin the process of appointing a successor to the sacked Craig Levein.

Asked if Roy Keane and Sam Allardyce and other such high-profile managerial candidates were realistic options, she said she “couldn’t see why not”.

David Moyes, another wellknown name linked with the post, has confirmed he is not interested in this vacancy, nor the one created at Hibs yesterday following Paul Heckingbottom’s departure.

Budge revealed she will “cast the net wide” in her search for Levein’s replacement, citing Steven Gerrard’s recruitment at Rangers as showing what’s possible.

“Look at some of the other managers we have in Scotland at the moment,” she said. “A few years ago we would have questioned if that was possible. Hearts are no different. We need to compete with the top clubs in Scotland. To do that I want to ensure we get basically a very experienced and high-profile manager.”

This would appear to rule out current interim manager Austin Macphee but she stated he was still a contender despite Sunday’s 3-0 defeat

She described him as the ideal first-team manager then. And perhaps he was. But now, over two years after Craig Levein returned to the front line at Tyncecastle, Hearts owner Ann Budge admits she made a mistake.

Not handing him the chance to return to the dug-out per se. That seemed to work, for a spell, despite initial disquiet. What she is annoyed about is allowing herself to be talked into permitting Levein to do two jobs at once despite her concerns.

This instinct, something she knows she should have trusted, has been proved right and led to the sad scene last week where Budge had to fire her friend, ally and right-hand man.

It felt doubly bad. Due to her decision to “go along with” those fellow directors who persuaded her to allow Levein to continue as director of football when he was re-appointed firstteam manager, it meant having to sack him from not just one, but two, jobs.

He is being retained, for now, in a notional role. The extent of his influence will continue to be a matter of speculation and conflict.

Is there anything Budge would have done differently, she was asked yesterday, after a bitterly disappointing 3-0 Betfred Cup semi-final defeat to Rangers the previous day had compounded the desperate state of affairs at Tynecastle, where a club sitting in a relegation place is also presently rudderless in a football sense.

“I think not just on the football side, on the other side, I have made appointments that subsequently I have felt were the wrong appointments,” she said in a briefing with reporters. “But if you are going to make a decision and be successful then you are going to make some mistakes.

“I don’t want to say I would do anything differently. But the whole question of whether I should have gone along with the suggestion of Craig doing both jobs, I think that is one

I will ask myself (about) for a long time.”

She has another regret involving the more humdrum matter of office space. She wishesshehadbasedherselfat Riccarton, where the club’s training base is, rather than Tynecastle. It meant she was distanced from football matters in a physical and, it follows, emotional sense as well.

“Maybe if there had been more facilities at Riccarton, one of the things I have said over the last couple of years is that I would have preferred to have spent more time at Riccarton so I was more engaged with the players and so on,” she said. “That was a practical issue I could not find a way around. I can’t go up to Riccarton and just float. That does no good for anybody. If I could change one thing, I would change the extent to which I got involved with the processes in the football department.” With Levein gone the two most important roles in the football operation are now vacant. Austin Macphee is filling the manager’s position on an interim basis and could do so until after the Kilmarnock game towards the end of this month. Budge revealed she could appoint a new sporting director – the title has changed since Levein’s departure, since the successful candidate will have limited input in first-team affairs – before a new manager is in place.

Indeed, that would seem “logical”, she said, since the new manager will ideally want to know who he is expected to work alongside. Budge even suggested Levein might – might – fill the sporting director’s role on an interim basis. What she knows for sure is that her intention to let him stick around this season and work in the background will receive a very mixed reaction, and, indeed, already has.

“It’s very weird with Craig, there are some who will not have a good word to say about Craig and there are others who just basically want him to succeed and who hold him in high regard,” she said. “Since Thursday the number of people who have asked if he is okay…

“Yes, there will be a reaction,” she added. “The very fact Craig is going to continue to be at the club creates a reaction. In some people’s eyes, it’s very clear: ‘that hasn’t worked so he has to go’. I have a different view of life: ‘why throw the baby out of the bath water?’”

She is pained by the contention among some people that she had the wool pulled over her eyes by Levein, that a self-made millionairess is somehow so wet behind the ears, she was played by him and is continuing to be played.

“I guess when you read things like I have been manipulated…. yes, it is annoying. I get irritated by it. It is very easy to make assumptions.

“I do not believe for a second I’ve been manipulated,” she added. “I know who makes the decisions and everybody at the senior level of this club knows who makes the decisions. So that annoys me – ill-informed comments, either because they haven’t asked the question or they’re misinformed.”

She insisted she is comfortable with her decision to relieve Levein of his duties just three days before a cup semi-final, with suffering defeat in any case. She claimed the supporter response would have been even worse had Levein still been in charge.

“The decision didn’t have to be made but it was something I thought long and hard about,” she said. “I thought about what would give us the best chance of success on Sunday and what would be the fairest thing to do for Craig.

‘I think once I had made the decision and it was a definite decision I felt the fairest thing was to make the decision then. If I hadn’t made the decision and the result had gone the same way then I think the one thing we would have heard more of is the booing. I didn’t want that for anybody.”

NO DECISION, MORE BOOS

“The decision didn’t have to be made but it was something I thought long and hard about ...

If I hadn’t made the decision and the result had gone the same way on Sunday, I think the one thing we would have heard more of is the booing. I didn’t want that for anybody”

ANN BUDGE