Elvis has left - will the building survive?

There were plenty of goals in the SPL last weekend, with Hearts back to winning ways after a run of 10 league matches without a win, but it’s the latest own goal they scored off the park that dominated the headlines. Valdas Ivanauskas, back as coach and apparently refreshed after his month-long sick leave, had hinted at a possible resolution between the club and their suspended captain, Stephen Pressley, but it turned out that it was only the terms of his departure that were being discussed. Having agreed to the termination of his contract – and signed a confidentiality agreement – Pressley’s 8-year relationship with Hearts is over.

You hope, for his sake, that in return for keeping his gob shut, he has asked for any money owed to him to be paid upfront, in cash, as Hearts’ record of paying their bills is not great. Just ask George Burley, Jim Duffy, Phil Anderton or Racing Genk, who are all still waiting to be paid money owed to them by HOMFC. Yet Pressley won’t be short of job offers if he needs help paying off his Christmas spending. Celtic, Rangers and Dundee Utd have all been linked to him, while George Burley has expressed an interest in bringing him to Southampton. At 33, his playing career looks far from over.

The real question is not why Pressley has left Hearts – it is clear by now that Vladimir Romanov does not tolerate dissent of any kind – but why it is that the Hearts fans are still keeping faith in their eccentric owner, despite the latest victim of his ruthlessness being their talismanic and popular captain. Oh sure, there are some unhappy voices, but the majority view is expressed by Shaun Lawson, whose latest article urges his fellow Jambos to continue to back the regime at Tynecastle.

But, in these fractious times for the club, backing one party means siding against the other, and that means supporters turning their back on Pressley. One accusation levelled at him by these supporters is that he’s too old and too slow, and no longer good enough to justify his place in the team – an opinion that doesn’t seem to be shared by those clubs now competing for his signature. The other is that, by hijacking the press conference in October to voice his concerns about the management of the club, Pressley betrayed his employers, and deserves his punishment.

This is a gross distortion of the situation. In an era when players are widely seen as spoilt, egotistical idiots, Stephen Pressley is not your average footballer. He doesn’t even look like your average footballer. He doesn’t wear bling or big-label hoodies, but instead has adopted the idiosyncratic, scruffy style of the mid-90s Glasgow indie scene. He would look more at home on a stage in a dingy venue, rather than a football pitch. He is also an intelligent, thoughtful man, who has used his understanding of the game to overcome his limited natural ability. He lives quietly and out of the limelight off the park – on it, he’s a natural organiser and leader, and the sort of committed player fans rightly love. As the old cliché goes, he would run through a brick wall for the team.

Speaking out about his concerns with the running of the club public was surely not self-interest, or an attempt to engineer himself a move away from the club, as some have ludicrously suggested. It was, instead, a genuine attempt to improve the situation at an organisation he cared about. As he said himself, he had been expressing those concerns for sometime internally, but Romanov clearly wasn’t listening.

And was this really a sackable offence? In many ways, what Pressley did was unprecedented, but only in the sense that he put himself in front of the cameras. Players blab about issues that their club would rather remain private all the time – it’s just that usually they do it through their agent or trusted journalist. Using the press to try and encourage a bid for your services from a rival club is surely much more disloyal, but it happens all the time and players don’t get sacked for it.

Yet Hearts supporters put themselves through these convoluted thought processes because the alternative is terrifying. Hearts, as a club, is technically close to bankruptcy. Its debts at least match its assets, and already exceed them. Unlike Abramovich, who bought Chelsea for cash and cleared the debt at a stroke, Vladimir Romanov has just transferred the debt to his own bank. If Romanov was to walk away, and his bank called in that debt, the club will be in real peril. So the fans will try all they can to keep their sugar daddy happy, hoping he will stay long enough to redevelop the ground and help Hearts earn the money they need to pay off the debts.

At the moment, though, the opposite is happening, and so far Romanov’s ownership has seen a large increase in the club’s debts, not a reduction. Those same fans who are still championing the chairman believe he has a coherent plan to turn things around – but on the crucial stadium redevelopment there is still no progress. Meanwhile, the club captain - who proved his commitment to the cause time and time again - is now yesterday's man.

Surely, any properly thought out plan for the club would have found a role for Stephen Pressley, who has been such a linchpin for the past 8 years. Ivanauskas described him as the “cement” holding the club together just a couple of weeks ago, which now looks less like an attempt to heal the divisions, and more a way of patronising him into accepting his pay-off.

Now the cement has gone, it’s time to see if the bricks start falling down.