Craig Levein explains thinking behind Hearts documentary after fan disappointment

Former Hearts manager Craig Levein has defended BBC documentary This Is My Story: Inside Hearts saying the producers never intended to cover the ailing first-team squad so much.

Former Hearts manager Craig Levein. Picture: SNS

The third and final part of the mini-series aired earlier this week. There were no scenes of explosive manager rants from inside the dressing room. Instead a lot of time was spent covering ground staff, the women’s team, youth coaches and other various aspects of the club.

Though some Hearts fans breathed a sigh of relief, expecting embarrassment from a programme which covered a season in which three different managers (including Levein himself) roamed the dugout and the club were ultimately relegated prematurely from the top flight, other Scottish football supporters were left disappointed. They were hoping for fly-on-the-wall style action and a real deep-dive into the inner workings of a calamitous first-team, such as witnessed in the acclaimed Netflix documentary Sunderland Til I Die.

Levein, though, reveals it was never supposed to be an exposé on the first team. The BBC just happened to cover the club in a campaign where an awful lot happened on the park as well as off it.

He said on the Football Daft podcast: “I haven’t seen it yet. Some people have contacted me about it. When they started to do it... it’s quite bizarre, they started filming when I got the bullet.

“So I never really spoke to anybody from the programme, on camera anyway. I like the people who were doing it.

“Actually, it wasn’t really meant to be the sort of Sunderland documentary, or Leeds documentary, it wasn’t meant to be like that.

“It was just more about having a look behind the scenes. But I think everybody, because of what happened, with the Covid, and also me leaving, Daniel coming in, he left, Austin was in charge for a while... there was all that stuff going on.

“I think everyone was wanting to see what happened and what situations arose. But it wasn’t meant to be like that.

“It was just meant to be more of a behind-the-scenes thing. Not so much, just about the football.”

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