When you break them down, the numbers are quite something. Craig Levein's first competitive game as a Hearts player was 35 years ago last month, his first game as manager was 18 years ago last month. He has 401 appearances in the playing ledger and 192 in the management one. In five weeks' time, when his team visits Dundee, his combined total will hit 600.

Six hundred games, an incalculable amount of rows and one heart attack. And he's still standing - or sitting, in this case - at Hearts' training base at Oriam in Edinburgh. Does the game still consume him the way it did before? Absolutely. Is it still his life? Unquestionably.

It's last Friday and he has just done another news conference and dropped another few bombs. "It's just a carry-on," he smiles. "I don't bite as much as I used to. When I was Hearts manager the first time (2000-2004) I'd be on the phone every Monday morning to the Edinburgh Evening News complaining about every article. Now it takes a fair bit for me to pick up the phone. I've done it once I think."

There's been a few nibbles, though. Neil Lennon and the natural order, Derek McInnes and phonegate, Michael Stewart and, er, lots of things.

"The thing is, Lenny's a pal and Derek's a pal and they got annoyed with me and I got annoyed with them. We're all doing the same job and nobody understands the pressure associated with being a manager more than a manager. We all suffer the same things, we all have the same fears, we all feel very low if our team loses. We all have empathy. We understand each other."

Levein talks about striker David Vanecek and the latest rumble, in which he said his new signing was "rubbish". "David was talking to Hearts supporters on Twitter, or whatever, and he was over-promising and then he arrived and he under-delivered. He was sitting at home bigging himself up and he let his guard down.

"I was annoyed. I would have got more angry years ago. Definitely. I'd probably have run the backside off him for a week and got him injured or something. He 100% gets it now. The league is different to what he thought it was. He's created a problem for himself because once Uche [Ikpeazu] is back, Uche is gonna play. That's a great weapon to use as a manager. You can't use many these days."

Sportscene pundits Thompson & Stewart on Vanecek

'I'm not as angry now; Scotland was peak anger'

Levein remains a hugely compelling football man, one who talks, and who is talked about, more than most.

With their win over St Johnstone last weekend, Hearts have climbed back up to fifth in the league. Not great, but with their injured players now vacating the treatment room, Levein feels there's an opportunity to return to the excellence of early season when they won eight of their first 10 leagues games and topped the Premiership.

During that heady run, of course, he suffered a heart attack. The experience has made him calmer, he says. "I'm not as angry, I know that. Scotland was peak anger."

When Levein talks about his years in charge of the national team from 2009-2012, he lets us into a world of reflection and, in many ways, vulnerability.

"It hurt me, of course it did," he says. "I had a really good job at Dundee United and things were going really well, the academy was starting to fly and I wouldn't say I didn't want to take the Scotland job but I was very reluctant to leave United. I ended up taking the job and I wouldn't say I regretted it almost instantly but I found myself looking for things to do.

"At United, I left the house at seven each morning to go to Dundee. Training the first team, then watching the academy at night, then watching the kids' games. Hours and hours and hours, seven days a week. From that to nothing. You don't get an instruction manual on how to do the national job. Basically you just get left.

"With a club, you brain is engaged all the time. With Scotland it was like, 'What am I going to do this week?' I'll go and watch Blackpool on Saturday, Burnley on Sunday and I'll pop into the Manchester United training ground on Monday, then I'll come back up the road, stop at McDonald's and have three burgers. It's a bizarre life and it wasn't enough. I was used to buzz. Always something happening. Training, games, press conferences, problems to solve, watching the academy, agents on the phone, it was full-on and it filled your life.

Craig Levein won 10 of his 24 games as Scotland manager

"The national job fills your life for two weeks and then it's nothing. There were months and months without a game, months and months going to England looking at players. That's a lot of McDonald's, eh? That's maybe where the heart attack came from."

He laughs at the thought, but that period in August last year was a troubling chapter in his life. Mercifully, he's been in rude health since then. Last season at Hearts was a marathon of stress - taking charge after the departure of Ian Cathro and playing at Murrayfield among other things - culminating in a sixth-place finish, but he came through it, rebuilt his team in the summer and went back for more.

"I've always wanted to be busy and that's why I love the job. When I was manager at Cowdenbeath (1997-2000) and earning 200 quid a week, or something like that, I always wanted to make myself useful. I'd help coach the kids, I'd build the fence for the stock cars. I remember doing that one summer. I immersed myself in it.

"When I came back to Hearts in 2014, I watched the kids playing all the time. I know the personalities of these players. I know the name of just about every kid in the academy down to maybe 12 years of age. That's about 90-100 kids. I bet you I could name them all if they walked in here now.

"I have a connection with them and we have a really bright future with these kids, but it can be hard as well. See releasing a senior player? That's not a problem. See telling the younger ones that after five or six years in the system they're not getting a contract? It's horrible. It's really upsetting. It's the hardest thing to do in football."

'Why would anyone be against VAR?'

Levein has spoken about his support of VAR in the Scottish game. As he sees it, "there's an idiot on every street" and sometimes it only takes a bad call from a referee for that desperado to cause mayhem.

"I just don't get why anybody would be against VAR," he says. "If a ref makes a mistake and it gets fixed, then the kind of nonsense that John Beaton had to go though after the last Old Firm game disappears.

"Refereeing an Old Firm game is a very difficult thing to do. Half of Glasgow are Celtic, half are Rangers, half of your street supports one team, the other half supports the other, so if you're a Glasgow ref or a Renfrewshire ref or a Lanarkshire ref then you are living in those places where people are getting upset. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. There's always gonna be somebody in your street unhappy.

"The other option, and I know [Celtic manager] Brendan [Rodgers] talked about it, is full-time refs. Currently, they get about £25 or £30k. You then have to say how much do you pay a ref to go full-time. You already have refs who have good jobs earning £40k, £50k, £60k and they have another £30k on top of that from refereeing so their income is £90k. So do you have to make it £90k?

"A lot of refs don't want to go full-time, so now you are taking a group of less experienced refs from lower divisions to do the job, but are they good enough? It's fraught with danger going down that road. VAR is the obvious answer. It's the one thing that will help, but, you know, I've been wrong before."

Almost 600 games as player and manager at Hearts tends to give him more cache than most. At 54, he has the enthusiasm, work ethic and devilment of a man half his age. Levein has much work to do to get Hearts to where the supporters want them to be, but nobody should doubt his colossal desire to make it happen.