Interview: Billy Brown, Hearts assistant manager

THE Musselburgh Athletic website tells you that Billy Brown used to play for the club, and his CV details his time there as manager, but only he can explain just how strong the links are. The Hearts assistant manager is intrinsically bound to his hometown team. Emotionally, professionally, in fact, in virtually every way possible.

There is little wonder that he and his family will don their special T-shirts and board supporters' buses bound for Kilmarnock and this afternoon's Scottish Junior Cup final between Musselburgh and Auchinleck Talbot. Brown grew up round the corner from Olive Bank, Athletic's home ground, and his first school peeks its head up over the boundary wall. It was the ground where, with his grandfather, he first watched the game that has occupied the vast majority of his subsequent hopes and dreams. It was where he ended his playing career and where he learned his trade as a manager. It is also where his parents' ashes are scattered.

"It will be a hard one for me whether my ashes will be at Olive Bank or Tynecastle. Maybe half and half," says Brown. Musselburgh is his town, it always has been and always will be. "I've probably only been away from this place about six years in my entire life, when I left to play for Hull straight from school and then when we (him and Jim Jefferies] were at Bradford. But even then I kept my house here.

"I have been going to watch Musselburgh since I was just a wee boy because my grandfather was a season ticket holder. I remember then, even when I was only about seven or eight, pretending to pick the Musselburgh team and I eventually did pick the team."

If Tottenham Hotspur legend John White, who grew up in the same scheme as Brown, provided the inspiration for him to make it as a player, it was Musselburgh Athletic who fashioned his management dreams.

His grandfather had passed away by the time Brown returned to Olive Bank first as player and then manager. Having had to quit playing at the top level due to a cruciate injury, he embarked on a coaching career at Newtongrange Star before he got the call to come home.

"It was the pull on the heart strings, it really was, to come and be the manager of Musselburgh was brilliant. I wouldn't say it was emotional but it was great, it was where I had wanted to be. I wanted to be manager and back then I never ever thought I would go on and do what I have done."

He spent almost a decade at the club and the experience was priceless.

"In management terms I was brought up in a hard way but definitely it's the best way. Jim (Jefferies] and I never went to management courses like they do now.If they went to Musselburgh Athletic or Gala Fairydean, where Jim was in those early days, for six months they would learn what it's really about. I think that's why we have lasted as long as we have.

"You learn about every aspect of the club, you have to know how to deal with players, take the training, you're out at nights finding places to train. But you learn how to do it while also having to get results."

When you are manager of your home-town team, the difference between victory and defeat is being able to walk down the street without being peppered with advice or criticism, or being able to head to the local for a pint without taking abuse. Being heckled from the terracing by people you went to school with certainly helps with the thickening of skin.

"You have got to learn to take it and it's not easy but if you have had it on your way up from people you know or you drink in the same pubs as or live in the same street, then it does make it easier to handle when it's a faceless voice in the crowd.

"Nowadays so many former top players get their pick of the best jobs but being a top player doesn't give you any right to be a good manager and that has been proved. I would recommend anybody wanting to become a good manager to go to the lower reaches first because Musselburgh Athletic were instrumental in what I have done."

The ascent has been speedy since those days but no matter where Brown goes, he never forgets where he came from. "To go from being the manager of Musselburgh Athletic in 1988 to being in the Premiership in England in 2000, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, it's amazing. We won the Scottish Cup with Hearts just ten years after I left Musselburgh. Just shows you that it can be done. There is no doubt that there are managers in junior football who are as good if not better than people who go on to get jobs in senior football."

It wasn't just Brown, though. Just as the current manager David McGlynn's family are involved in all areas of the club now, it used to be a Brown dynasty.

"The involvement I had down there was different. My mother used to wash the strips and my dad helped her do the canteen and Anne (Brown's wife] helped and Stuart and Linsey (his children] would come and help me weed the terracing, so it was a lot more than just a coaching job.

"The other thing is my dad dropped dead just after a Musselburgh game in the club. We had been beaten by Edinburgh United and he was carrying the urns through for my ma to do the teas and the last thing he said was 'I'll bring my boots on Saturday'. Then a wee while later somebody came through and told me my dad was lying on the floor.

"He died and his ashes and my mother's ashes are at Olive Bank."

The family affair is still an important factor. These days it is the McGlynns. The manager is Raith Rovers boss John McGlynn's nephew, while his brother and sister-in-law, Charlie and May, are on the committee.They also serve the lunches to Hearts players at Riccarton, bolstering a link between the Tynecastle club and Musselburgh Athletic which has long been pretty strong. The list of former players includes Willie Bauld, Graham Shaw and Scott Severin, loaned to them from Hearts, while several coaches have served their apprenticeship there, including McGlynn and Brown.

If he wins the Scottish Junior Cup this afternoon, Brown reckons McGlynn junior deserves his chance to graduate to the bigger leagues.

"I told him that the other day but it's about somebody giving him the opportunity."

Musselburgh last won the trophy in 1923 and there have been decent teams fielded in the interim but Brown believes this group are as good as any he has seen and that gives them a decent shot at glory. He and the busloads of fans heading to Kilmarnock today certainly hope so.