WHEN is a blip not a blip? When does a glitch stop being the result of human error and start being evidence of a deeper, longer-lasting problem?
The first time Hearts staff did not receive their pay on time, spokespeople for the club and for Ukio Bankas Investment Group (UBIG), the parent company, implied the reason was some little quirk which could be easily resolved.
"There have been no
problems at UBIG," Jurga Chomskyte-McGeever, UBIG's head of marketing and communications, said when asked by The Scotsman if cash-flow problems were the cause. "We hope (the non-payment] will never happen again. We don't expect it to, as there are no objective reasons why it did this time."
Back at Tynecastle, spokes- people for Hearts appeared to be totally in the dark about what was going on. When it was revealed that payment had not made its way into staff bank accounts as usual, one of them said the money would be paid early the following week.
That did not happen, and on the next Wednesday Hearts changed the payment date to Friday. They met that self-imposed deadline, with backroom staff receiving their monthly salaries in the morning and players getting their weekly wages later in the day, but there was never any reason given either for the initial non-payment or for the delay in rectifying the situation.
That was in late September. Chomskyte-McGeever said that UBIG were to meet Hearts director Sergejus Fedotovas in a bid to determine what had been the cause of the glitch, and after that meeting had taken place she declared the matter closed without any further explanation.
Two months on, and the event for which there was "no objective reason" took place again. This time it was only the players who failed to receive their money on time. Once more, a Hearts spokesman said the wages would be paid shortly, this time blaming a "blip". "The funds are in place," he said. "The money has been transferred and will be in the players' bank accounts on Monday morning."
This time there was no need for back-pedalling, but it was not until around 5pm that the club felt able to release a statement asserting that the players had been paid. Before that, senior officials had been in a meeting, and were said to be in touch with UBIG officials and trying to find out what the exact position was. "As announced earlier, players' wages were processed on Friday and the money reached their accounts this afternoon as agreed," the statement read in its entirety. The implication was that everything was back to normal.
There was no attempt this time to apportion blame. But nor was there anything about the cause of the delay, and that is the worrying thing both for those who went unpaid for three days, and for Hearts supporters. Until both delays are explained plausibly, and it is shown that whatever faults caused them have been ironed out, players and fans will fear a recurrence.
True, there is still a section of the support which remains loyal to Vladimir Romanov, the man who has a controlling influence in UBIG and, as such, has the fate of Hearts in his hands. But beyond that diminishing group there is an increasingly sceptical majority.
Romanov has been scaling back on his ambitions for some time now, and has long since given up making grandiose pronouncements about imminent European glory for Hearts. He and his companies are subject to the same economic vicissitudes as the rest of the world. Financial concerns far bigger than UBIG have faced serious problems in recent months, and it would therefore be little surprise if the Kaunas-based group began to encounter cash-flow problems.
We cannot say at present that any such problem was the cause of either this recent delay or the first one, but we cannot simply write them off either. Not without evidence one way or the other, and there is very little of that coming out of Tynecastle.
In fact, the vast majority of people within the club, players and backroom staff alike, know very little either. Their Lithuanian paymasters apparently see no need to tell them.
In such a situation, it is a wonder that the team is performing as well as it is, and much of the credit must go to Csaba Laszlo, the manager, for keeping morale high.
But positive results on the pitch can only continue for so long if there is nagging uncertainty off it, and given Romanov's track record we cannot expect clarity any time soon.
