THREE years ago today, Andy Webster stepped off a plane at Edinburgh Airport with his team-mates following a pre-season stay on Vladimir Romanov's luxury cruiseliner in the south of France. It was his last official act as a Hearts player.
He drove straight to Tynecastle, collected some personal belongings and bade farewell to the club which had been his home for three years and had honed him into a top-class international defender. With the benefit of hindsight, he would surely have
chosen to be less rash.
Falkirk and Dundee United are currently considering making an approach for the 27-year-old Rangers player, and such interest offers a portent of hope that a desperately stagnating career can still be resurrected after three barren years which have brought just 11 competitive appearances.
It didn't need to be this way. Invoking a loophole in Article 17 of the FIFA statutes, enabling him to cancel his Hearts contract to join another club outside Scotland, must have seemed a good idea at the time. The player and his agent, Charlie Duddy, certainly thought so after an embittered public outburst from Romanov in which Webster was branded "unreliable" and excluded from the first team after contract negotiations collapsed. What was to follow was unpredictable and unfortunate, if not necessarily unavoidable.
Webster joined Wigan Athletic in July 2006 but played only four times before moving to Rangers on loan in January 2007, both moves requiring ratification from FIFA. The Ibrox club had an offer in the region of £1million for the defender rejected by Hearts in July 2005 and suspicions were that David Murray, the Rangers chairman, made a verbal agreement with his Wigan counterpart Dave Whelan to "bounce" Webster off the English Premier League club.
This has never been proven, but in his first Rangers training session, Webster sustained a serious knee injury, followed by an ankle problem after his loan was extended. Then came further surgery on the previously-injured knee before Murray purchased him outright for an undisclosed fee 12 months ago. To date, he has appeared just once for Rangers and spent an unremarkable six months on loan at the English Championship side Bristol City last season, playing only six times.
Where he goes from here is anyone's guess. He relinquished first-pick status at Hearts, where he had also donned the captain's armband, to leave in the most acrimonious of circumstances. He has been unable to add to his 22 Scotland caps since leaving Tynecastle. Had he stayed – and signed a proposed contract worth in the region of £12,000 a week – he would not have suffered six months of almost total inactivity and therefore may have averted the initial knee injury suffered at Rangers. With his Tynecastle contract due to expire in summer 2007, Webster could then have moved west rather less conspicuously.
Valdas Ivanauskas, Hearts' interim head coach during the awkward final weeks of Webster's stay, believes the centre-back would have been captaining club and country by now had he remained in Gorgie.
"I was very lucky to have him in my team. I think if he stayed with Hearts he would have kept playing and stayed in the Scotland team," said the Lithuanian.
"He was a team player and I wanted him in my team. Elvis (Steven Pressley] was captain but in the future Andy had a big chance to captain Hearts, and also Scotland. Now the situation is difficult but I wish him the best.
"It was Andy's choice to go to England. For us it was not good. I can't understand because Andy is one of the best defenders in Scotland. He wanted to go, England was a big chance for him and I know he got injured and then had a lot of problems. He was one of Scotland's best players but he must play now. He is young and can have a big future."
Inactivity is indeed Webster's biggest problem right now, the price of his impatience to free himself from Romanov, perhaps. The man who replaced him alongside Pressley in Hearts' central defence, Christophe Berra, pictured right, thrived to the point where he is now preparing for an English Premier League debut with Wolves after a £2.3m transfer south in January. By contrast, Webster was termed not sufficiently fit to aid Bristol City's quest for promotion last season.
"He came here and, to be fair, wasn't fit to play," said manager Gary Johnson. "He wasn't Championship fit but he was fit injury-wise. It was a bit chicken and egg. We couldn't get him match-fit without the matches. The Championship isn't a league where you can give people games to get them match-fit.
"We had a little bit of a stinker there because Andy's a nice lad. We were hoping he would be a lot fitter than he actually was. Unfortunately we couldn't give him many starts. We had him on the bench and he came on a few times but he wasn't quite right.
"He needed a lot more time, that's for sure. It depends what level a player wants to play at. He could have gone to League One or League Two, with respect to those leagues, and maybe got away with it. But Championship standard was too high and too sharp for him at that time. That's all I can really say and that's why he didn't get many games.
"He's had a horrendous run of injuries and been really unlucky and I feel really sorry for him. He was away from his family down here and wasn't playing. I did speak to Rangers a couple of times about taking him back early but they decided they wanted him to stay down here."
For Johnson, it was difficult to decipher what had gone wrong with the domineering centre-back he first noticed early in 2006 while watching his son, Lee, play for Hearts.
"I knew Andy from Hearts and he was playing really well then," he continued.
"Obviously my son was there, as was Jamie McAllister, so I watched Hearts on several occasions at that time. I saw his ability. He was a fantastic player who had a full career ahead of him.
"Unfortunately, a couple of injuries and a couple of things don't quite go right and all of a sudden you're chasing your career. Nobody wants to see someone's career not reach the level it should be at. He was already there at one point. He's a good lad and he worked hard and I'm sure he can get back to where he was."
Upon voluntarily freeing himself from Hearts, Webster had his case championed as a "victory" by FIFPro, the worldwide representative organisation for professional footballers.
Ironically, events over the last three years have ensured he has lost more than he could have imagined.
The full article contains 1151 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
