Billy Brown relives Hearts glory days and Hibs Hampden nightmare as he offers unique peek behind both Edinburgh curtains

It gave him the best of times and the worst of times but Billy Brown will be forever indebted to the Scottish Cup.

The chairman of the Scottish Managers and Coaches Association might be 72 now – three years younger than Roy Hodgson he says with a twinkle in his eye – but his passion for football remains as strong as it was when he left Musselburgh for Hull City more than half a century ago. Brown the player had a decent career with Motherwell and Raith but it was as half of a managerial partnership with Jim Jefferies at Berwick, Falkirk, Hearts, Bradford and Kilmarnock that he made his name as a coach.

And never was that reputation more enhanced than a quarter of a century ago when the duo led the Jambos to their first trophy success in 36 years, beating Rangers in the Scottish Cup Final. The 25th anniversary of that success will be celebrated next week and Brown admits it didn’t get any better than that in coaching and management.

But the final of the same competition in 2012, when in the Hibs dugout AGAINST a Hearts side he’d left earlier that season, proved it could get a hell of a lot worse. Brown and Jefferies’ second stint at Tynecastle ended in the way of so many managers under Vladimir Romanov, with the sack. They weren’t surprised – in fact they were expecting it almost from the moment they went back through the doors of the Gorgie club after a seven-year spell at Kilmarnock.

“The club had changed,” Brown told the Off The Record podcast. “A lot of Lithuanian players had been brought in and there were some good players but the whole culture had changed.

“There were some loose cannons but it was great to be back at Hearts. We knew we’d get the sack. We weren’t young, inexperienced boys. We knew what we were going