The big interview: Craig Levein 

The head coach has done more than his fair share to keep the Tynecastle club alive. 
By Douglas Alexander

The board is the target and the sums do not add up. It can only be Tynecastle. Craig Levein is halfway through a leg of darts against Peter Houston, his assistant, in the office of the football department. Several important facets of the Hearts head coach’s personality are captured in this cameo. His humour and competitiveness are especially evident as he quickly spots some faulty subtraction by Houston on the blackboard. “You see what I have to put up with,” he laughs. Slowly but surely, Levein whittles 501 down to zero to level the series at one leg each.

Darts have tungsten in them and sometimes you suspect Levein also has some of the metal in him. Malleable is the last word you would use to describe him. He provides a cup of tea from a machine and leads the way to another private office. The interview begins but is soon interrupted as Hearts’ receptionist pokes her head round the door to inform us that the photographer has arrived. “If he goes away and works out what he wants me to do, it will save all that messing about,” replies Levein. He starts talking again but soon another knock, another interruption. The photographer would like to take some pictures while he is talking. This time the response is sharper. “I’d rather not get my thoughts interrupted by photographers or people banging on the door or anything like that,” he says firmly. Even his glasses fail to shield you from the laserbeams of intensity that blaze from his eyes. It is less an unfriendly glare, more a searchlight gaze that makes you feel as though your mind is being peered into and your motives illuminated. It is important, you feel, not to flinch because Levein is an unflinching sort.

David Taylor and the Scottish Football Association discovered as much when he contested a £4,000 fine and four-month ban for mild criticisms of a referee all the way to the Court of Session last year. Martin O’Neill and Celtic were made aware of it when he released video footage to clear the name of Andy Webster after John Hartson protested he was innocent of elbowing the young Scotland centre-back in a League match a fortnight ago. “I have this thing in me where I won’t be trodden on by anybody, although I don’t mean to be disrespectful to anybody. I was brought up in a manner where I had to show respect to people, but if it gets to a point where you think people are taking the piss out of you, then I have always been the same. I have got to the stage now where I don’t apologise for it any more. I don’t do it to be bolshie, I do it because there has been an injustice of some kind against myself or somebody I know. Nobody knew more than me the furore it was going to cause, but we were ready for it.”

O’Neill phoned him for a lively debate — Levein mimics holding the phone away from his ear — but it has not diluted his respect for Celtic’s manager and his team. When the sides reconvene at Tynecastle in Saturday’s Scottish Cup tie, Levein will see in Celtic many of the values he is trying to bring to Hearts. “He (O’Neill) might be upset about the John Hartson thing, but it wouldn’t change my view on what he’s done at Celtic. He’s been great for them and he’s lifted the whole profile of Scottish football. I can’t speak for them but I am sure Rangers supporters, when Celtic beat the English teams, would have been secretly happy. That finish to the League last year was storybook stuff.

“I admire him in every single way. What he has done has been remarkable. I don’t know anything about Martin O’Neill other than spending five or 10 minutes with him after games, but I look at his team and I see a team that will give everything for the club, and what does that tell you about the coach? “They are the best team in the League by a mile with their all-round strength, power, fitness, speed, aggression. I was gutted after the Cup draw. I am not one of those people who will say: ‘no, no, that was the draw we wanted’. If you want to play Celtic, why not do it in the final? Kilmarnock came out first, Rangers came out second, Hearts at home was third and then, of all the balls in that big thing, come Celtic.”

Levein was appointed on December 1, 2000 and lost his first match 1-0 to Rangers two days later. He used to tell his players they could beat the Old Firm, but both he and they knew his words — “all the crap of what people say you should say in dressing rooms” — were empty. He needed his men to grow up physically and mentally first. He set about making the team bigger, stronger, more consistent, but the final hurdle was the Becher’s Brook in their minds. Hearts finally cleared it last April when they beat Celtic 2-1 at Tynecastle during the title run-in.

“Now we are capable of beating them and the reason for that is that we have now experienced the situation where we have done it. For me, that’s everything. We have still had a few doings because on their day they will give you a doing, but the players think, seriously think, they can beat them. They now think they can beat Rangers, but whether we do or not is another thing. I was sitting in that dressing room, looking into their eyes three years ago saying: ‘We can win this game’. I can tell them that stuff, but if they don’t believe me it doesn’t matter. It needed them to win or get a draw or see them under pressure, their defenders kicking the ball out the park. We’ve got bigger, older, hungrier. We’re desperate to be compared to them.”

YET there are two different graphs of progress at Hearts. Levein’s task is to earn more points while spending fewer pounds. It was hoped his background at Cowdenbeath where his players earned £15 a week (the weekly wage bill amounted to £380) would be the perfect grounding for the austere era Hearts were entering. Each summer he has had to cull the squad that he inherited from Jim Jefferies, but it has been like bailing water out of a sinking frigate with a teacup. Hearts remain £17.6m in debt, almost three times their annual turnover.

Gary Naysmith was sold for £1.75m six weeks before Levein arrived, Colin Cameron to Wolves for the same fee in August 2001 and Antti Niemi to Southampton for £2m a year later. “I thought Antti Niemi was better than Andy Goram, that’s how highly I rated him. He never made a mistake. I had two years with him and he didn’t cost us one point. His decision-making? Incredible. One-on-ones? Incredible. Penalties, anything, reflexes. He didn ’t come for crosses unless he was 100% sure he was going to get them, the best kind of goalie you can have.”

After the collapse of the transfer market, though, Hearts have been forced to turn to the property market to address their burgeoning losses. The club’s board want to sell the ground for £10-15m and rent Murrayfield for home matches. Cue outrage from supporters’ groups who believe it is the board’s mismanagement that has brought them to such brinkmanship. Levein could have stayed out of the Murrayfield minefield but avoiding confrontation is not in his nature and, having taken a keen interest in the finances since his appointment, he can see no other way for the club to survive.

“They hate me for saying that we have to go to Murrayfield. The only thing I can look at, and I have been doing this for the past three years, is how things have been progressing with the wages and the income. We have been sitting here some nights coming back from board meetings and saying ‘where’s this all going to end?’ When you are selling Antti Niemi and Colin Cameron and you are still posting losses of over a million pounds.

“It is all going to end in tears. Whether the tears are because we are leaving here or because we are staying here. The whole thing was heading in only one direction and it was irreversible. Once you get up to £15m the problem is the interest itself on that money. This is the road we are heading down and I don’t see any parachutes. I don’t see anything and I am waiting for Chris Robinson or somebody to come up with a solution. People want their money back. I don’t know how it equates to Leeds’ debt, but with their turnover it is arguable who is worse off.

“They have been trying to put the brakes on it. Right away we got rid of the likes of Gordan Petric and Gordon Durie. Then Thomas Flögel, then Steve Fulton. It seemed continuous, but meanwhile I am looking at the figures and it’s not getting an awful lot better. How can you keep selling players for £2m? That’s impossible. First, we may not have a player who is worth £2m. Secondly, the marketplace is shot. Who are we going to sell to? The English First Division has no money, and are the players that we are putting out in Hearts jerseys just now Premiership players? “In football, it is crazy to say ‘take the emotion out of things’, but I’ve got to. I’ve got to look at how can I keep putting a team on the park? Looking at it financially, I don’t know if Murrayfield is going to be any good. Seriously, I don’t know, I have no idea, but what I do know is that if we continue to go the way we are going it is game, set and match. You are looking forward to the situation of what might happen at Murrayfield and people are saying you might not be there in three years’ time but I can guarantee you, if we continue to lose £2.5m to £3m a year, we’ll not be here (Tynecastle) anyway. If we stay here for a year and see what happens? That’s another £2.5m loss and £20m of debt, and I don’t know what the interest rate goes up by.”

Robinson is particularly reviled by those against the move to Murrayfield, but in a rare case of a manager giving his chief executive a vote of confidence, Levein says their relationship is good. “I wouldn’t say that I am going to be going on holiday with him, but when it comes to a professional relationship I have not one complaint. He has never caused me one problem in all the time I have been here. I think he has made enemies in the past, though, and I think a few of those people are using their opportunity now to try and get back at him.

“What they (the board of directors) have said is going to happen, has happened. Any time that I have needed a player, I have got one. I have brought a lot of people in these years when we have been really tight. We probably could have, at some point down the line, gone for the Aberdeen approach or the Hibs approach just now. Everybody out. I have been trying to encourage this gradual weaning off and they backed me in that. There have been one or two moments at board meetings where I have asked for players; I made two pre-contract signings last year with Dennis (Wyness) and Paul (Hartley), and they let me make some investments to keep the whole thing rolling forward.

Levein has been particularly disappointed by what he views as the rabble-rousing and publicity stunts of Gary Mackay, a former Hearts teammate who is now an agent and radio pundit. Mackay asked to have the Scotland strip he wore when playing and scoring against Bulgaria in a 1987 European championship qualifier returned by the club. “It was stage-managed,” says Levein. “He had photographers waiting round the corner. I’ve got a jersey here, Dave McPherson ’s got a jersey, John Robertson’s got a jersey in here. and don’t tell me that myself and Robbo have any less feeling for this club than Gary Mackay has.”

Meanwhile, the cuts continue. Another £850,000 must be pared from the wage bill this summer, and the decisions are getting harder and harder. Levein must determine which of the 12 players who come out of contract in the summer can be retained. “I want to know what our income streams are and whether they are going up or down because, ultimately, when it comes right back down to it, the problem is going to land on my desk. Rather than me kick up and say ‘what? £850,000?’ and then storm into the board meeting to say ‘what the hell is going on here?’ I knew what was happening, I knew there was going to be a dramatic cut, and again what I have tried to do is make the cut over two years. Otherwise this £850,000 could have been £1.5m.

“I have 12 players out of contract and I have looked at this £850,000 in so many different ways. I will get rid of this player and that player. Maybe get rid of an extra one and bring in two at a lower level, and honestly, I have no idea where I am heading. I have plan A, B, C right down to Z, and then plan A1, A2.

“Previously, I made my mind up early who I was going to lose. I haven’t done that this time. I could say ‘I don’t want to lose him but he takes £250,000 out of the wage bill, so there you go’. There is not much meat left on the bone now. The value for money and worth of the player to the team are just about the same now. They are on what they are worth. There isn’t an exact formula on the park and I need to judge whether I need to keep an experienced player in a certain position or whether I can afford to let him go.”

THERE is a glimmer in the gloom. It lies on the outskirts of Edinburgh, west of embattled Tynecastle at the Riccarton campus of Heriot-Watt University, where Hearts’ training centre and youth academy is almost complete. Levein hopes to be using it by next month, ending a nomadic existence around the capital and its environs searching for suitable training pitches. Sometimes the east coast wind is disruptive, sometimes a set-piece practice is interrupted when a player treads in dog dirt.

At Riccarton a 15-foot thick conifer hedge will break the wind, and the underfoot conditions should be less hazardous. Yet any youngsters expecting to be mollycoddled may find themselves surprised. “They will be too busy training to be mollycoddled,” growls Levein. “I think in society now the work ethic is not what it was. The discipline thing is a little bit different than it was 20 years ago.”

Levein cut his teeth at Cowdenbeath, 

as both a player and then manager, before moving to Hearts and has attempted to replicate that experience for many of his own young players who have been loaned out to sides in the lower divisions. “I am trying to speed up the maturity of these younger players by putting them into an environment where they have to realise that if somebody’s wife wants to go to Majorca then it might well come down

to how many bonuses he gets,” he explains. 

“Society is changing. If you shout at people now, kids especially, they look at you as though you have three heads. You might be the first person that’s ever shouted at them. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but society is going through this thing ‘don’t put any pressure on anybody whatever you do,’ and then they arrive in football. Professional sport is highly pressured and I don’t want them getting into my first team before they realise what it is all about. I want them to do their utmost to win and to be disappointed if they lose. Not come in here and say ‘I hope I make it as a player’. I wish I had a profile of some kind where I could get them as they walked through the door and say ‘I’ll take you, you get tae . . .’ so I didn’t have to go through all this just trying to find out who’s got the character, but I suppose that’s part of the job.

“Consistency is my biggest thing about football. Every time I put a team on the park, for every player I am tossing a coin for, I have a problem. You know, ‘what’s he going to be like today?’ Once you get to four or five of them, you have a major problem. That’s why Elvis (Steven Pressley) plays every single week, that’s why Webster has got to a stage now, that’s why Patrick Kisnorbo has been playing, Alan Maybury plays, Scott Severin plays, Neil MacFarlane plays. You start to see the pattern developing where I know what I am going to get.

“I don’t have a young player like Scott Brown at Hibs, other than probably Webster, who is that type of extrovert. A man in a young boy’s body. That’s how I see Scott Brown. A really good player, but also mentally ready for it. I have Joe Hammill who I think is an amazingly gifted player, but he won’t mature until he is 21 or 22. He won’t play in the first team on a regular basis until he is that age because he’s a bit more introverted.”

We have talked enough of Hearts’ development. For 90 minutes in fact. What about Levein’s? Where next for him? In response, he recalls the time when he was a rising young player rather than a rising young manager. Liverpool, Spurs and Rangers were monitoring him and then his knee buckled after an awkward landing in a reserve game against Hibs. That taught him never to look too far ahead. “If I want to keep getting better at this job and progress myself , I have to keep getting results. If it’s difficult because of financial problems then we’ll just have to grind them out. I don’t see any other way. I haven’t thought long-term. I never think long-term. I played football and I got an injury. One minute I am looking to go this way and the next minute my career is seemingly over. It is very, very difficult to assume that your career is going to keep progressing.”

All that can be said with certainty right now is that Levein is as promising a manager as he was a player, and that is indeed promising.

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