There is more humour about Kyles than might be anticipated from what can sometimes appear to be a deliberate cultivating of a hard image. A photographer’s suggestion she place her four-inch high heel on top of a football for an iconic snapshot is punctured faster than the ball would have been. Tough cookies don’t crumble easily and yet there is a vulnerability about Kyles, too. The convoluted Hassan Kachloul affair, which could have cost Livingston their Premierleague status for paying an amateur player, was stressful enough to force her to re-evaulate her priorities when it comes to football and the rest of her life. Resolving it is just something else for this workaholic to work on.
“Oh God, yeah, football is addictive, but it’s a nice addiction. I feel my addiction level at the moment is fine, I’m in control,” she jokes. “I’ve always been a workaholic, it’s in your DNA, you can’t change that, but you do think, ‘Heart attack quite soon’. This year I’ve probably consciously thought, ‘I’ll pull back a bit’. For my own sanity. I ’m guilty of getting too involved and drawn into it too much. I can hardly remember what I did before. You try and say it’s just a job and it’s not. When I became chief executive I said, ‘I won’t be going to any games’, but I haven’t missed many. It really gets to you.”
Especially when the team isn’t winning. They have reached a CIS Cup semi-final, against Dunfermline at Easter Road on Wednesday, but the team exited the Scottish Cup to Alloa and are bottom of the league. Pearse Flynn, their chairman, has said Lambert will get the season regardless. No-one seems to have told Kyles this. “I can’t imagine those words coming out of Pearse’s mouth,” she splutters.
So Lambert’s under constant review? “Of course,” she replies. And you can’t say you would stay with him even if Livingston went down? “Absolutely not,” is the next brisk response. “If Paul put his feet up next week and said, ‘Ach, well, I’m here forever’, then I’d sack him. We realise where he wants to take the team might take time, but to give him the year regardless? No way. I don’t get the year regardless. I wouldn’t expect to. All the staff here have constant performance reviews, it’s never a case here of, ‘You join this club, you’re in with the bricks’. Paul is in the public eye. How many goals? How many points? It’s real easy to judge him.”
That said, Lambert can be assured of more boardroom support than his predecessors, Preston and Richard Gough, the latter parting in acrimonious circumstances last summer. “We have more belief in Paul than the previous managers,” says Kyles. “It probably makes me calmer that we’ve found the right person for this club, but I don’t want any complacency.”
Advertisement
Is Lambert, who Livingston wanted a year earlier than he arrived, being judged by the same criteria, though? Has he already been given more time? “Well, that’s a fact, as I think we learned from last year. And I’m sure Allan Preston would read that, throw up his hands and say, ‘Now she’s learned’. We’ve got more involved in the football side to see what can happen if you change things too often. There are decisions you make at the time that in retrospect you think were too hasty, but it was the right decision about Allan. We stand by it.
“As far as people thinking we were ruthless, well, yeah, and to be honest, I don’t care. There’s no point in us getting in a huff about it because, yes, we were being ruthless in sacking Allan. It may have been perceived as panic because it happened so sharply and was unexpected, but it wasn’t. We acted on it within a week with Allan having no inkling, but that’s just the way we work. If you ask people that were sacked by myself and Pearse in our previous business (telecommunications company, Damovo), that’s how they were sacked as well.”
Would she describe herself as a similar character to Flynn? “Erm, there are some elements of us that are very similar. We’re both stubborn and determined to be successful and take everyone with us, but there are enough differences to spark. Pearse is a huge ideas man, but if I don’t like them, I’ll tell him. People thought, ‘Pearse Flynn has a lot of money and he’ll write some big fat cheques’, I think they realise now that he’ s not prepared to do that.”
Kyles laughs when she recounts SPL chairman Lex Gold’s frequent reminders to himself to stop addressing attendees of meetings as ‘gentlemen’ in her presence. Yet, in this so-called man’s game, has she experienced some more deliberate sexism? “The reality is it’s a lot less than people might like to think it might be. I’ve never overtly experienced people doing or saying things to me differently because I’m a woman. I think they’ve got to know me fast enough to know that doesn’t wash with me.
“What is maybe hard for people to understand is this isn’t the first time I’ve been in a male-dominated environment in business. Some of the descriptions I’ve had from agents are because they perceive I’m being tougher to prove a point, but ex-colleagues will tell you it’s not a new version of me at all. I’m working with Pearse again here because our styles complement each other so there’s no point me becoming somebody else or that partnership wouldn’t work. Am I conscious of the fact some people have that I’m female running through their heads? Yes, I’ve had agents sitting where you are now and I can read their minds. They turn on the smarmy charm and I’m, like, forget it mate.”
Advertisement
For her circle of friends it’s a whole new ball game. “I’ve got female friends who had no interest in football telling me they now read the newspapers from the back,” she smiles. “One in particular, she amuses me so much, she texts me on a Saturday afternoon when she’s shopping saying, ‘I can’t get to the radio, what’s the score?’ so it’s addictive. I just hope it doesn ’t take over my life.”
Given that after the interview Kyles heads down to watch Livingston’s reserves, that battle is perhaps not won yet. “No Karren Brady questions, you should get a prize for that,” she says, in closing. Kyles is her own woman, be sure of that.