Tom English: Honesty introduced to Tynecastle

The BDO administrators Trevor Birch and Bryan Jackson entered a ruined Tynecastle. Picture: Neil Hanna

It’s a balancing act he walks. A tightrope with no net. He might as well be in a circus which, in a way, he was when sitting in the one-time house of Vladimir Romanov. As if we needed any reminding of the farcical regime just passed, a journalist’s phone briefly went off mid-conference, the ringtone that of a clown’s nose being tweaked. How apt.

Perched high in a stand at Tynecastle, the lush green pitch behind his back, Jackson was asked a direct question about the future of the very place we were standing in and met it with a direct answer that  illustrated his qualities as a straight talker. Is Tynecastle under serious threat? “Yes,” he said. There was no point in sugar-coating it, he continued. No point in telling the supporters what they want to hear. No rationale for making promises that he cannot keep. The stadium is in danger. He hopes it doesn’t come to that, but it might.

Beside Jackson in the stand at Tynecastle was John Robertson, a legend from happier times. Robertson had a quiet defiance. If the stadium goes, then the stadium goes, he said. If Hearts have to play somewhere else then they will. Survival is the only game in town now. Everything else fades to the background. He’s right.

As Jackson spoke, the mind flitted back a year to Duff & Phelps. Their opening press conference at Rangers and the hollow words about administration not being inevitable and the frankly ludicrous assessment that Daniel Cousin might still be signed at a salary of about £6,000 despite the club, courtesy of Craig Whyte, having shafted the taxman for millions. From Duff & Phelps we heard PR and a lot of garbage. From Jackson, we heard the reality of a club in crisis. People lost their jobs yesterday. Ordinary workers. There one minute and gone the next, redundancy papers in hand and, perhaps, the departing words from Sergejus Fedotovas, still in their minds.

Fedotovas had left the club by thanking his employees and stating that all they had done “will take its place in history.” Such claptrap from Fedotovas and such silence from Romanov. Good riddance to the pair of them.

In an hour yesterday, Jackson introduced honesty to Tynecastle where, for too long, there has just been psychobabble. Here’s the truth, he said. There is no money. The club should have, for its own good, been sent into administration weeks ago. There is a need to sell 3,000 additional season tickets in the next 14 days, a sum that will tide them over for the next four months by which time the club might be sold. If they don’t get the cash then a fire-sale of players will happen, which will make the club more likely to plummet down a division next season, a prospect that might spook a potential buyer now.

There are interested parties, but he has no idea how much money they are packing and how much they are prepared to offer. From Lithuania he is hearing sympathetic words from the creditors, but he can’t put a price on their sympathy. If one of the bidders offers £1 million for the club, how sympathetic will the Lithuanians be then? How about £2m? How sympathetic is sympathetic? He doesn’t know. This was day one-and-a-half, he remarked. It’s early. Long road ahead.

Jackson had the begging bowl out, but at least he didn’t produce it at the end of a barrel of a gun. Previously, Hearts fans were warned of the consequences of not pumping ever more funds into their stricken club to the point that kids turned up with piggy banks, a scene that ought to have brought shame to Romanov and certainly illustrated how massively he failed as Hearts owner. From blasting the media to attacking the Old Firm and referees and the SFA and the SPL and anything else that crossed his path, there are so many memories from the Romanov era. At the heart of them all is the image of the big-time banker reduced to taking coppers from kids.

The fans were, in Jackson’s words, victims of blackmail, before adding that he himself was doing pretty much the same thing as Fedotovas, only in a nicer way. It all amounted to pleading for money from the very people who have  already “given and given”, he said. “We’ve nowhere else to go.” It’s up to the fans again.

The season ticket numbers have to rise by the required 3,000, from 7,000 currently to the survival figure of 10,000. There is hope, but no expectation of a result there. Jackson is taking nothing for granted. There’s been too much of that going on at Tynecastle lately. In everything that he said Jackson tried to find the balance between life and death, between hope of a brighter tomorrow and acceptance of a grim today. He was pleading with the fans. It has come to Jackson and a metaphorical violin and a promise that if the supporters step up to the plate again then their money is the only thing that can keep the club going until a rescuer is found. And that’s the next drama. There are supposedly four interested parties out there, one in England, a consortium, that sounds particularly serious.

The administrators have spoken two of the four groups, but are hardly out of the starting blocks in trying to discover who they are, what they have, how much they are prepared to spend and precisely what is deemed acceptable to the creditors. That’s a game within a game, a drama to come. Right now, there are season tickets to sell and buyers to find. Jackson’s great fear is not so much that Hearts supporters don’t want to buy but that they can no longer afford to. He said that time and again yesterday. It’s the great dread. One of them, at least. He does not know what will happen next in this frightful saga. One thing was inescapable last night, though. In the evening  sunshine Tynecastle looked magnificent. A terrible beauty.