Brown eager to prove a point to Romanov with success at Hibs

On Tuesday night, after having sportingly occupied himself with the task of shaking the hands of the beaten Motherwell players following Hibernian’s dramatic penalty shoot-out victory, Brown was relieved to see he had unintentionally missed out on the mass celebrations in front of the away supporters. Colin Calderwood, the man who recently invited Brown to sample life at Hibs following a long association with Hearts, lapped up some long overdue glory with his players, and those who had followed the side to Lanarkshire.

“I turned round and looked and they were all at the crowd, and maybe that was not a bad thing,” says Brown. “I didn’t mean to miss it but maybe it would have been too much in people’s faces. I have a lot of respect for both the Hearts and Hibs supporters. I hope I can tread that line with... sensitivity.”

The pause as he endeavoured to select the right word reflects just how conscious Brown is of the difficulties involved. He knows the score as well as anyone and has already had experience of crossing enemy lines – as a Hibs supporter working at Hearts.

This inconvenient truth has now become a rather convenient one, although there are those cynics who place Brown at the Dougray Scott end of a spectrum, the other end of which is occupied by the rank and file long-suffering fans who dutifully turn up each week, and will be at Easter Road again this afternoon for another must-win match, this time against Dundee United. Brown would probably accept the charge, as well as the film star looks. His happy childhood in Musselburgh – “I was brought up in the Wimpeys, in Musselburgh. It wasn’t salubrious but I didn’t know that at the time” – was made even more enjoyable by trips to watch both Hibs and Hearts. Brown was there when Hearts lost the league title to Kilmarnock in 1965 – “I can remember sitting opposite the tunnel”. And he was there the previous year when Hibs defeated Real Madrid.

“People say I was a Hibs supporter – I was because I went there more often, but I didn’t feel at that time that there was any hatred between the two clubs,” he continues. “There is a hatred now that’s developed. If that’s because of the Wallace Mercer thing, I don’t know. But when I was a boy that hatred was not there. There was a friendly rivalry and it was quite good fun. Consider Gordon Smith, one of the greatest players ever to play in Scotland never mind Hibs,” continues Brown. “He was part of the Famous Five and then won a league medal at Hearts and I don’t think at that time it was frowned upon, or it didn’t appear to be. I was just a wee boy at the time.”

There was certainly no hostility between Brown and Jim Jefferies, despite the latter’s more partisan view of things – “Jim was an out and out Hearts supporter, I don’t know if Jim ever went to Easter Road,” reflects Brown, whose professional association with Jefferies was so rudely interrupted by Vladimir Romanov, the Hearts owner, in August.

“I know it’s the fashionable thing that I am supposed to suddenly hate Hearts now but I don’t,” says Brown. “I am here with Hibs because I want to be. I could not have wished for a bigger job, and at the end of the day I was not wanted at Hearts. I was loyal there but I don’t owe Hearts anything now.”

January 2, the date of the next Edinburgh derby, promises to a particularly intriguing affair. “After we beat Motherwell the other night, I thought I know what’s going to happen here – we are going to draw Hearts,” says Brown. “Hearts, I thought, were certainties [to beat Ayr United]. But that’s the way football works out. In a way I am quite glad we don’t play until Jan 2. By that time I hope we are in a better position here to compete with them.”

Brown will finally take that bow in front of the Hibs fans this afternoon. His past has caught up with him and he could not be more delighted. To the uninitiated, it is no more complicated than this: man is sacked from one job and then is hired to fulfil the same role somewhere else.

But in football it isn’t so simple, even if Brown himself briefly strips away the emotion of it all to describe how his life has changed. “Instead of coming out to the bypass and turning right, I turn left,” he says, with reference to his new daily commute to the Hibs training centre near Ormiston from his Musslburgh home, having become used to heading west to Riccarton, where Hearts are based. “There is less traffic now,” he adds.

During two spells with “the Hearts” he did not exactly shout from the Musselburgh rooftops about a time when Hibernian inhabited his life, even if it was often referred to by others.

“When I was a wee laddie I couldn’t afford to go and see the games, so I went to watch Musselburgh Athletic,” he recalls. “But, when I had the money, I was of the generation where one week you went to Tynecastle and the next week you went to Easter Road. As it happened, my dad was friendly with Willie Wilson who was the Hibs goalie, and we got free tickets to Easter Road. We used to go up there more regularly because we got in for nothing.

“At school there was one laddie whose dad made him support Rangers, but apart from that it was all Hearts and Hibs. But as I say, going to games was not cheap, and if it wasn’t for Willie Wilson becoming the Hibs goalkeeper and getting free tickets... well, let’s say that swayed things a wee bit.

“I can remember Jock Stein coming to Easter Road. I can remember vividly being at the game when they played Real Madrid in a friendly, and Willie Wilson was in goals. He was the first goalkeeper to wear black. And Hibs played in all green that night. I could probably tell you the whole Hibs team....”

Well, he did ask, you think, conscious of not having wished to put Brown on the spot. Go on then. “Wilson, Fraser, Parke, Stanton, McNamee, Baxter, Cormack, Quinn, Scott, Hamilton and Neil Martin – and I can remember Peter Cormack scoring a cracking goal. That was around the time I watched Hearts as well, but I watched Hibs more often.”

You feel a childish desire to ask him to identify all the faces on the montage in the main corridor of the Hibs training complex in another credentials-proving exercise. But then, whether he was a dyed-in-the-wool Hibs fan or not, Brown probably could.

His life has been defined by a devotion to both football, and, of course, to Jim Jefferies. They were in the same class at school, the same football team, and, since 1988, have worked pretty much continuously together, working their way up from the bottom of the old Scottish Second Division – where they found Berwick Rangers – to the Premiership with Bradford City.

But it’s their Hearts chapters which most people identify them with, and provides the fascination now that Brown has switched from west to east Edinburgh. He does not deny that the manner of both his and Jefferies’ most recent departure was painful. Jefferies was at least asked by Romanov to stay on as director of football; Brown, however, was simply told to pack up his belongings and leave.

He picks his words carefully as he explains the added motivation to succeed at Hibs. However, this desire is not born out of spite towards Hearts as a club. Rather, it seems more personal in nature.

“It was a shock but should it have been a shock?” he asks. “Everyone told us [what to expect]. We went in with our eyes open.

“Bitterness is a wasted emotion,” he adds. “It was hard getting the sack. Somebody thinking you can’t do the job is a hurtful thing. And I am going to put that right. I have a burning desire to show them – not Hearts, not the club – that I can do well here.”

He didn’t do badly at Hearts, both first time around and second, when he and Jefferies answered the call after Csaba Laszlo had been sacked. “What did we have to lose?” asks Brown.

“If we’d kept Kevin Kyle fit [last season], I’m not saying we would have won the league but we would have challenged for it, because we were on a tremendous run with him.”

Brown felt bruised after the sudden axing and admits he could have done “with another month off, from a personal point view” after the experience. But Hibs came calling, just as they had done during the undistinguished time that was Billy Brown’s schooldays. He rejected their advances then, having already given his word to Hull City. Musselburgh Grammar could compare to any other school in the county at the time when it came to churning out footballers. He did make an appearance at Easter Road, where he – and Jefferies – tasted defeat to Dalkeith Thisle in the final of the Scottish Cup.

“We had a top team at the time,” recounts Brown. “Jim played, Ally Brown, who went and played for West Brom, Alex Martin went to Hull with me and played for Motherwell. And there was Tom McLeod, who played for Falkirk and Scotland Under-21s.”

It was while playing for the school that Brown got picked up by Hull, which meant he had no need for the careers advisor he had routinely snubbed in any case: “I never went to see him, because I just thought I was going to be a football player. How crazy can you be?”

He was quickly consumed by home-sickness, which was not surprising considering he was just 15. The side could attract crowds of up to 40,000 at the time, but as Philip Larkin found, Hull could be “so busy, and yet so lonely”.

“I used to go on a Sunday and sit at the train station and watch the trains go to Edinburgh,” Brown recalls.

Despite not making a first-team appearance he stuck it out for four years. From Hull he joined Motherwell, where he experienced his greatest moment as a player in a Texaco Cup fixture against Stoke City, World Cup winners Gordon Banks, Geoff Hurst et al.

“We drew 0-0 and then went down there to Stoke and got beaten,” he recalls. “I will always remember the 0-0 game. My ma’ and da’ were there and we came back and went to my brother in law’s house as the highlights were on the telly later on. And my brother in law James said to my mother: ‘don’t tell me the score because I am going to watch it’. And she was like: ‘it’s OK, because there was no score...’”

Brown would never say it, but one wonders whether there is some resentment at the way he has always been identified as Jefferies’ sidekick. He was captain of the school side, and clearly had potential as a player, although his size counted against him. “I didn’t have a great physique,” he says. “I didn’t do any body work as such and I think I would have benefited from that. It’s a regret for me that I didn’t do as well as a player as I should have done. I could have done better.”

Then came the knee injury which finished his career at just 28, after a happy spell at Raith Rovers. “Like every player, I possibly found my level,” he says. “Mine was the Scottish Second Division.”

He had made the switch to part-time football and worked at Ferrantis for a while, and also in a television factory in Haddington. But football remained his life and you suspect he has rarely been happier than when managing Musselburgh Athletic, where his grandfather used to take him to watch games when he was a boy. “I used to imagine picking the Musselburgh team and then I ended up picking it for real,” he says.

“I learned more there than in all my years playing football. I thought when I was at Musselburgh I could have coached or managed anybody. I couldn’t have done, I wasn’t ready. But I had enough confidence to think that.”

It’s possible he might never have the chance to be his own man. Brown is 60, and contracted to Hibs until the end of the season. This arrangement suits both parties for now. “I don’t know how many jobs I have left in me...,” he says.

As for Jefferies, Brown wonders whether he wants to return to front-line management, with rumours linking him with Aberdeen as Craig Brown endures a difficult spell at Pittorie.

“I don’t know if Jim’s had enough or not,” says Brown. “There’s been about three or four times we thought we might be going to Aberdeen, stretching back to the first time we were at the Hearts. I just wonder if things don’t work out at Aberdeen whether they might go for another older manager, or whether they might look at a different route.”

There are whispers that Jefferies might even be present at Easter Road this afternoon to watch, with a possibly aching heart, as his long-time lieutenant continues to develop a new partnership, with the dark, silent type that is Calderwood. If Brown has a Facebook page, his current relationship status would surely have to read: it’s complicated.