Hearts didn’t deserve to fall into our league... but I’ll be doing everything I can to keep them there
WHERE John Robertson and Hearts are concerned, legendary status does not necessarily equate to blind loyalty.
Having spent the summer in his old club’s corner during the SPFL vote controversy, the Inverness Caledonian Thistle manager is now hatching a plan to try and prolong the Tynecastle misery.
Robertson remains convinced Hearts should not have been demoted in the wake of an incomplete Premiership season and was proud of his club’s objection to the SPFL voting process in response to coronavirus.
Nevertheless, Caley Thistle’s ‘do no harm’ policy ended the moment the dates were fixed for next month’s Championship kick-off.
‘Hearts have all the pressure because they have the biggest budget by a country mile, ten times more than most teams in the league,’ says Robertson, Hearts’ top goalscorer of all time. ‘You can either sit back and say they are going to win the league or you take the fight to them.’
No one could accuse Inverness of shunning conflict during those turbulent lockdown days.
The Highlanders’ chief executive Scot Gardiner threw a grenade into the SPFL’s response to the pandemic by using a live radio appearance to reveal the timeline behind the so-called ‘missing’ vote from Championship rivals Dundee.
After signalling their intention to
vote against the SPFL resolution, Dundee managing director John Nelms later reversed his submission in dubious circumstances.
Gardiner’s decision to hit the airwaves was not well received by rival directors affronted that the contents of a divisional WhatsApp group were made public.
Gardiner remains unrepentant and, as a close friend and ally stretching back to their shared time together as part of Ann Budge’s hierarchy at Hearts, Robertson continues to back his CEO.
‘I’m proud of the way the club stood up and voted,’ he said. ‘There was no need to demote anybody. I don’t care if people believe this or not but our main aim from the start was to do no harm to other clubs.
‘I was invited to join a board meeting, we looked at our league and asked whether we felt it was fair to demote Partick Thistle. Then you look at Stranraer and Hearts and it wasn’t fair on them either. So straight away our answer was no.’
Nevertheless, Robertson scoffs at the notion of Caley Thistle becoming a pariah club in the wake of a summer of acrimony and recrimination.
While he expects there to be some frosty boardroom exchanges, he believes the ‘bad blood’ forecast by Hearts keeper Craig Gordon is not sufficiently voluminous to reach the extremities of the Highlands.
He continued: ‘Has there been a lot of bad blood? I think there has at board level and from fans who might have got a bit upset at times.
‘But do we have a fan base that is going to upset others? No. Are there fans out there who will be upset at us? I don’t think so.
‘Is there going to be a few difficult meetings and conversations among directors? Possibly, because a lot of things have gone on.
‘The way the vote was handled was wrong. I don’t think any fair person could say otherwise. After the Court of Session expert said they received the vote at 4:48pm, that should have been the end of it in my eyes. ‘The vote was defunct. Yet it was steam-rollered through.
‘The actions of board members have upset fans and I can understand why. I don’t think there was any need to do it.
‘But I couldn’t affect it. And there’s nothing Stevie Crawford, Robbie Neilson, James McPake, Peter Grant, Dick Campbell, David Hopkin or any other manager could say either. ‘From a managerial and players’ perspective, I don’t think there is going to be a problem. Our first league game is Dunfermline away. I saw Stevie Crawford at the funeral of the Hearts kitman Brian Marr recently and it was fine — we go back a long way.
‘So I don’t think anything that has happened at boardroom level will necessarily spill on to the pitch.’
Under Robertson’s management Inverness sat second in last season’s Championship table when coronavirus bit, an impressive feat given the spending power of the Dundee clubs who sat either side of them in the standings.
That performance made him an obvious contender when Daniel Stendel utilised a relegation break clause to leave Hearts but Neilson’s surprise flit from Tannadice to Tynecastle means he will again be in charge of the team earmarked as favourites for the second-tier title. Rewarded with the security of a new two-year contract at Inverness, Robertson, 55, wants his team to be disrupters.
‘It’s not up to Hearts to make it competitive,’ he continued. ‘I heard Olly Lee say they will beat everybody. That’s the attitude he should have but that will be the attitude of the other teams too.
‘Everybody would expect Hearts to win the league but because it’s a shortened format, if they don’t hit the ground running then who knows?
‘Robbie made plans to counteract that by persuading Ann Budge to bring the squad back early off furlough.
‘Their financial power gives them that opportunity to get match fit but it is not always the biggest budget that wins.
They have got the biggest budget but are under pressure to win the title
The way the vote was handled was wrong. No fair person can say otherwise
‘Hearts must make a fast start. If you are not in the top three after nine games, I don’t think you can possibly win the title. Because you are only going to have 18 games after that.
‘In a successful season, Hearts would normally play in front of 15-16,000 home fans at Tynecastle and take up to 4,000 to away matches. They will not have that to begin with. Will that affect them more than other teams?
‘Dunfermline, Dundee, Morton and ourselves all have decent-sized stadiums but we are used to them being a third or a quarter full. Maybe that will help us.’
At the behest of Gardiner, Robertson only welcomed his players back off furlough and into training on September 9, giving less than four weeks’ preparation time for the club’s first competitive fixture of the new season.
As fate would have it, that October 6 opener will be a Betfred Cup tie against Hearts at Tynecastle.
The manager knows his side is at a disadvantage but he is pleased with his trading in the transfer market.
‘Since I’ve come here we have lost 13 or 14 players to the Premiership. That shows we are picking the right ones. And if we can’t get up we are not going to stop a player going to that higher level,’ he said.
‘We’ve signed Shane Sutherland who was released by Terry Butcher and bobbed about between Peterhead and Elgin, scoring a load of goals in League Two.
‘Lawrence Shankland and Kevin Nisbet scored goals down the leagues and we have every confidence Shane will do the same.’
Offered the second chance to manage Caley Thistle in the wake of relegation in 2017, Robertson was immediately charged with slashing £1million from the playing budget.
Despite the cost-cutting he took the club to the 2019 Scottish Cup semi-finals, delivered the Challenge Cup in his first season and has last season’s final against Raith Rovers still to play. Meanwhile, the club’s wage bill can now be measured in the hundreds of thousands. ‘The objective was to get back to as close to sustainability as possible and, had it not been for Covid, we would not have been far away,’ he contends.
‘We want to show our directors, influential guys in the community, that we can get our losses down so we become a more attractive investment in the future.
‘That’s my job and it looks like the losses will fall dramatically again this year, even in the face of Covid.’
The pandemic has brought its own challenges for the manager but rural life was entirely conducive to lockdown. ‘It was strange but I was quite fortunate because (wife) Sally and I live on a farm in Cawdor,’ says Robertson. ‘Self-isolation was normal to us.’
Himself placed on furlough to minimise the cash drain, Robertson could not offer any practical help to Gardiner and had limited interaction with his players.
Conscious of the spectre of mental health issues, he enacted a plan to maintain harmony among a socially-distanced squad.
He added: ‘I would periodically text one or two of them to make sure everything was okay and through the club’s Togetherness initiative we were out delivering food parcels, too.
‘We didn’t want them to get into a negative pattern where they would only speak to one person and feel unable to move away from that.
‘After speaking to a sports psychologist, we felt the best solution was to have a well-being programme for all the players.’