Source: Daily_Mail
Portsmouth's Hart of steel: The man with the hardest job is hanging on
Days like yesterday are not meant to happen to managers in the Barclays Premier League but Paul Hart somehow sees the funny side when Portsmouth's kit man walks into his office with two new training tops.
Printed on the back of them in huge white letters is the name of the club sponsor, Jobsite.
'It's a recruitment company,' says Hart. A recruitment company his players might need if they don't get paid today.
At the eye of the storm: the daily struggle just to get a team on thetraining ground is taking its toll on Hart
It had been an extraordinary few hours for the affable Hart, from the moment he rose at 5am. He had tried, as he has done every morning in recent weeks, to block out the grim reality of Portsmouth's chaotic situation and focus instead on the football, on training, on keeping spirits high, on getting that first win.
Yesterday, however, it was nigh-on impossible. First there were the telephone calls with the club's beleaguered directors, then a meeting with his players. Hart is an old school manager but there he was alongside finance director Tanya Robins, trying to reassure his squad that they would, indeed, be paid and that the lawyers had, in turn, provided them with assurances; that everyone should put such concerns to one side and concentrate on trying to beat Wolves this weekend; that they might be working for nothing but they were still professionals.
'The players were brilliant,' says Hart. 'Very calm, very professional, the way they have been all along. It's tough losing seven games on the spin. It hurts. But the lads are working hard. Last week we lost again but they got a standing ovation from the crowd for the way they performed against Everton. That says everything.'
It says everything that those same fans have not turned on Hart. At Carlisle 10 days ago more than 600 Pompey followers burst into a chorus of 'Paul Hart's blue and white army', even though their team had lost their first six Premier League games.
'I think they understand how difficult it has been,' says Hart from behind his desk at the training ground. 'In all my years in football I've never known anything like it. In the Premier League it's unprecedented and I just find myself putting one fire out only to find another one has started somewhere else.
'It has been crazy from the day we returned for pre-season training on July 9. I had 14 players. 14 players! I had to lie to the media, tell them we had a squad of 20, because the truth was just too shocking. I ended up getting a load of names from the youth team and adding them to the list.'
How Hart operates would be beyond the comprehension of many of his Premier League contemporaries. He had no assistant manager after Brian Kidd chose to return north and still doesn't, thanks to Gary McAllister's failure to reach agreement with Peter Storrie, the club's chief executive, earlier this week. And no chief scout until Ray Clarke arrived just as the transfer window was about to close. 'I'm glad he's here but it was too late for him to be able to do anything for us,' says Hart.
As players went over the summer, sold to the highest bidder as Pompey teetered on the brink of administration, the club raised �35million.
Only then, as the window began to close, was he allowed the odd bargain signing, free transfer and loan deal.
He speaks glowingly of the players he has recruited. 'Kevin Boateng and Jamie O'Hara have been excellent,' he says. But he has been left with a side significantly weaker even than the one he inherited from Tony Adams in February.
'We had to beg, steal and borrow in our search for players,' he says.
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'We had to call in favours, defer payments. Even now I'm not sure if we've actually paid a penny to anyone for the lads we brought in.
'The previous owner (Sacha Gaydamak), Harry (Redknapp) and Peter (Storrie) took this club to the heights. It was incredible the way this club punched above its weight. Not least by winning the FA Cup 18 months ago.
'But this was a club with gates of no more than 19,000 that had the fourth-highest wage bill in the Premier League. There were some great players here - Campbell, Distin, Diarra, Johnson, Defoe, Crouch, Kranjcar, Glen Johnson.
That group of players enabled this club to compete with the very best. But ultimately there was a price to pay for that and that is the situation we finds ourselves in now.'
Hart could have walked out long ago. The end of the season would have been a good time to go. The team were only out of the bottom three on goal difference when he took over with 14 games left but he guided them to safety.
'My reputation had never been higher,' he says. 'But I wasn't going to leave. It is a great privilege to manage this football club and I was not about to walk away from that. I knew it would be tough when Peter Storrie came to me in February and asked me to do him a favour. And I will continue to stick at it.'
All along, other managers have been linked with his job. Sven Goran Eriksson was coming, then Avram Grant and countless others, and more recently Gordon Strachan.
'I remember what Kiddo said when we took over,' says Hart. 'With 14 games to go someone could have come in and looked good by guiding the team to safety. But they didn't and right now I don't know if there is a man out there who is up to it and would want to take on this challenge. I know I haven't been in a more difficult job than this one. It's never been as hard as this.
Sometimes you feel that just getting on the training pitch is a reward.
'And it's got progressively harder. Even in May it wasn't quite like this. We were working from a different budget to the one we have now. I certainly don't think anyone expected the takeover to take as long as it did and I don't think we expected what has happened in the last couple of days.
'But I have been here for two-anda- half years. I set up a youth development programme which I hope the club will benefit from in years to come and now I'm the manager and I will keep fighting.'
How does he maintain such enthusiasm? 'I have my moments but I try to keep them in this office,' he says. 'I don't have an assistant manager, which makes it more difficult. But I'll sit here and shout, stamp my feet, and then I'll go out and manage the players. And it is the players who keep my spirits high.'
He also draws on all his experience as a player, coach and manager. On those days with Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest.
'If he had been faced with this situation, Cloughie would have paid the bills himself,' says Hart. 'I remember a time at Forest when the club was in serious trouble. I think it was the VAT man and the club was facing closure. Cloughie wrote a personal cheque to pay the bill and then went into the directors and screamed "Don't ever put the club in that position again". I'd love to do that but I don't have the money!'
Nor, it seems, does the club's new owner. But Hart will continue with hard graft and a touch of gallows humour, something he displayed prior to this interview when he met the local press.
He did handle himself brilliantly yesterday. 'What was it Scarlett O'Hara said?' he asked his audience.
'Tomorrow's another day. It's been a particularly interesting day today, from first thing this morning, and if there is nothing tomorrow that will be great.
'But I remember when I was at Chesterfield. It rained on the Friday before the game and the pitch was so heavy I sent my coach out to get long studs. About 50 at £4.50 and I got dragged into the chairman's office to explain the expenditure. That was infinitely worse than this.
'I was at Forest when we were facing administration. I actually remember Mark Palios, who went on to become chief executive of the FA, interviewing me as a potential administrator. He was gathering information from me one minute and in the top job at Soho Square the next. I think I played a part in his rise, but hopefully not his fall.'
Hart had dealt with enough controversy for one day.
