A friend of mine once spent six months in Lithuania. He should have been there longer but he didn’t like it: dull, drab and boring, apparently.

Clearly he didn’t meet Hearts owner Vladimir Romanov when he was there. Because ‘Mad Vlad’ is turning the Tynecastle club into the most colourful spectacle in sport. With Celtic running away with the league and Dunfermline looking pretty much relegated already, Scottish football has been dull of late. You might not agree with much Romanov says but you can’t deny that he’d be great company in the pub.

After a quiet period, Vlad has come storming back into view. Firstly came a Glasgow newspaper interview in which he appeared to accuse Celtic and Rangers of bribing referees and players. Some people applauded. The largely-mythical favouritism of the Old Firm by referees is the staple of post-match conversations up and down Scotland (overlooking the fact that the same referees are often accused of favouring both sides of the great divide).

But the battered Hearts press office went on the defensive. As Rangers and Celtic ran to their lawyers – and the SFA did, as usual, SFA – Hearts claimed that somewhere in the passage from Russia to Glasgow the interview had either been amended or mistranslated.

And then came Vlad’s encore. “Thank God,” he said, “I haven’t come across any corruption in Scotland.” But he was unsurprised about the fuss. In Scotland he expects little else than "lies and distortion” from the media. A lesser man may have left it there. But not our hero Vlad. First he got stuck into Steven Pressley, Paul Hartley and Craig Gordon. The media had portrayed them as “heroic” when they spoke out about unrest at Hearts.

As a former submariner, Vlad knows more than a little about heroism and this was nothing more than a betrayal: “To my mind, there are no values in this life that are worth betrayal, even if we're talking about hooped shirts.”  Which did seem to throw Celtic back into the melting pot somewhat. And also suggest that Celtic and some of his players were somehow in cahoots. Which diminishes the earlier claims that his interview had been mistranslated.