Robinson: not fit for purpose? 

STUART BATHGATE CHIEF SPORTS WRITER 

IS CHRIS Robinson losing the plot? The primary responsibility of a chief executive of any business is its financial health, and given the present balance sheet at Hearts one would expect that responsibility to be a time-consuming one.

In recent months, however, the man who calls the shots at Tynecastle has become more and more involved in the minutiae of the club as his urge to impose his own agenda intensifies.

In doing so, Robinson is not only wasting valuable time which would be better spent elsewhere. By subordinating Hearts to his own narrow concerns - by effectively becoming the only voice of the club - he is increasingly damaging the reputation of a proud institution.

Some of Robinson’s interventions might be put down to harmless eccentricity: telling supporters boarding a bus to Sarajevo airport to check they had their passports with them, for instance. Others - such as confronting a French TV cameraman at the home game against Bordeaux and demanding his tape of the game - are just demeaning.

Most recently, though, as the debate has intensified over his proposal to sell Tynecastle and move to Murrayfield, Robinson has engaged in increasingly desperate attempts to put over his own views and disparage those of others.

One of his vehicles for doing so is the "Media Today" section of the club’s website: once a straightforward description of which stories on Hearts were running in which newspapers, this has now been turned into a forum for Robinson’s arguments on the Murrayfield issue.

In the match programme for last Sunday’s Celtic match, Robinson wrote: "We hope that those supporters who have reservations about Murrayfield can now see that our options are limited and that they retain an open mind".

The implication is that anyone who disagrees with Robinson must have a closed mind. 

This implication is strengthened by recent comments in "Media Today". Articles which take issue with the chief executive have been branded as partisan, while one post-agm pro-Robinson article was called "completely independent".

One might have thought that at this time above all, Robinson would be attempting a charm offensive both through the media and directly to the club’s support.

Instead, he is leaving it to chairman Doug Smith to present the diplomatic face of the club, allowing himself time to drive through his own programme.

The Scotsman has been the subject of a vendetta recently. First, during his marathon agm presentation Robinson promised Scotsman journalist Mike Aitken that the slides would be made available later - only to bar us from reproducing them the following day. Then on Wednesday this newspaper was not invited to Craig Levein’s briefing on the John Hartson affair, with journalists from other papers being phoned up and asked not to tell anyone else about the meeting because it was for "a select few".

Why were we not invited? Because The Scotsman has continually embarrassed Robinson by exposing the flaws in his pronouncements over why he wants to sell Tynecastle. And because, having acquired a powerful position where other club employees have to do his bidding, he has become intolerant of those of us who remain free to express our own opinions.

The club can, of course, invite who it wants on to its own premises, but it was a futile gesture: we got the story anyway. It was also a misplaced gesture: the meeting was about a footballing matter, not about the subject with which we have taken issue with Robinson. And it was a self-defeating gesture: if the man wants his opinions and those of others at the club to be heard, one would have thought that a newspaper based in the same city would be a good place to start.

Last week Robinson attacked this newspaper for being selective with facts. Yes - we have continually been forced to select the facts that he has chosen not to share with Hearts supporters.

The Tynecastle pitch is too small; we have to leave because we won’t be allowed to play European football, Robinson claimed. Wrong, says UEFA: you can play European games at one ground, domestic fixtures at another.

The main stand is creating fears for the safety of supporters. Wrong, says the City of Edinburgh Council. 

The rent for Murrayfield would be almost as much on a one-off basis as it would be for an entire season, Robinson said at the agm. Wrong, says the Scottish Rugby Union.

The desperate need to pay off the club’s debt is not the reason for the proposed sale of Tynecastle. Wrong, says the small print of the club’s annual report, which states that existing borrowings have been agreed on the basis that Hearts sell Tynecastle by 31 July 2004.

And to save us the trouble of exposing his deceit, Robinson confessed, again at the agm, that he deliberately misled supporters over the suitability of Murrayfield in a bid to talk up Straiton.

"That’s my job," he said. What is? To propagandise against a ground when it suits him, and then shamelessly to present exactly the opposite argument not long later?

Again, while that may be Robinson’s self-granted remit, it is one which no other chief executive finds in his or her job description.

One further example of Robinson’s misleading arguments about Murrayfield from the agm: a move to the rugby ground for next season, he asserted, would see Hearts make a modest profit of £75,000. Staying put would cost them a loss of £2.5m.

Where do those figures come from, if not out of thin air? We have been assured no deal has been struck with the SRU, which means that Hearts do not know how much Murrayfield would cost them in rent. And if they do not know that cost, not to mention income sources such as the sale of season tickets, they cannot make an accurate estimate of the profit or loss they would make there.

But then, given the club has run up a debt of £17.6m under his tenure, figures were maybe never Robinson’s strongpoint anyway. 

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