THE GAME IS UP IF PETRIE BECOMES SFA PRESIDENT — GARY KEOWN
ROD PETRIE once came up with the bright idea of giving Colin Calderwood a job as a manager. It ended just over a year later with the Hibs chairman, of all people, apologising for bringing in a guy whose lack of communication skills left people feeling alienated.
It was a little like Reggie Kray chastising Ronnie for being violent.
What made it worse was that Petrie turned down a reported £300,000 compensation offer from Birmingham City, who wanted to make Calderwood their No 2, four months before sacking him.
Who knows what brought them together?
Perhaps, in the one-time Scotland defender’s personality bypass, Petrie saw something of himself.
What a twosome they must have made.
At that point back in 2011, though, Easter Road was a grey, backward, unengaging place. A little like life under the Stasi before the Wall came down. Just more inward-looking.
There was an uprising bubbling, though. Looking back at some photographs from the lead-up to the club AGM that followed Calderwood’s inevitable departure, one stands out.
A group of supporters are holding a banner bemoaning the coming and going of eight managers in ten years and carrying the words: ‘Get Petrie Out Now!’.
It took another three years and another two managers before it
really came to a head, though — with 1,500 supporters outside Easter Road following relegation to the Championship and legends such as Pat Stanton and Jimmy O’Rourke even taking to the cobbles to demand Petrie’s head.
It was Petrie’s chopping and changing of head coaches amid collapsing standards on the park that left him without a leg to stand on. It is remarkable enough that he is still in a position in Leith, having parachuted in Leeann Dempster from Motherwell as chief executive just before relegation in 2014 to save his bacon and help end a 114-year wait for the Scottish Cup.
That he is now at the heart of the sub-committee to find the new Scotland manager, given his track record, inspires little confidence.
And the fact he remains in pole position to take over from Alan McRae as Scottish FA president next year simply hammers home what an anachronism the top level of that organisation remains.
It is incredibly weak right now with no manager, no chief executive, no idea of where it wants to play and no sign of a major sponsor for the national team.
It stands to reason the public have lost faith in it as well.
So, be sure that a number of the major clubs, unhappy with the attitude shown towards them by the dear departed Stewart Regan, can smell blood.
Reports have already surfaced about intentions to sideline the SFA, taking away its influence on the professional game and effectively leaving it to run the national team and the grassroots.
There has even been talk in influential circles over the last year or so about setting up a whole, new body. For sure, there is no love lost between the SPFL and SFA.
In many ways, it marks a catastrophic failure on both sides that this situation has been allow to fester during a period in which the national sport has faced so many challenges.
Yet, it is where we are and it is something the SFA surely must recognise.
They need to promote people capable of uniting the game, rallying supporters and offering real, fresh ideas.
Dempster has been mentioned as a candidate for chief executive and would be an interesting one, but a look at her Twitter bio suggests bailing out Petrie again might not be for her.
‘I now leave politics to the politicians,’ writes the former SPFL board member. ‘Bored of it now.’
The SFA also needs a manager capable of taking the national team to Euro 2020.
And it will need a new president capable of fighting the organisation’s corner and connecting with a deeply disillusioned public.
McRae seems incapable of that. His tenure, a by-product of a modernisation process that didn’t go far enough, is descending into an unholy mess.
And there is nothing to suggest Petrie, the vice-president who famously dismissed the disgraceful scenes at the end of the 2016 Scottish Cup final as ‘overexuberance’ in the most appalling press conference, will be capable of providing the kind of galvanising leadership that the SFA is going to need to stay relevant.
Given how Hibs have returned to life under Dempster’s guidance with greater engagement with the fanbase and wider community — not to mention two good managerial appointments in Alan Stubbs and Neil Lennon — it is easy to forget how bad things became at Easter Road under him.
Kenny McLean jnr, one of the main agents for change, accused Petrie back in 2014 of ‘starving us of our heart.’
Stanton, part of that heartbeat of Hibs, echoed the point.
‘The people running the club are detached from the support,’ said Stanton. ‘They (the fans) have been ignored and kept at arm’s length.
‘The last thing fans wanted was to turn it into ‘us and them’, but that is what happened.’
There are bright, inventive people within Scottish football. Dempster, Ann Budge at Hearts, Alan Burrows at Motherwell, Roy MacGregor at Ross County.
Mike Mulraney of Alloa and Partick’s Ian Maxwell are on the SFA board with two successful, well-connected business people in Gary Hughes and Ana Stewart.
Surely they can all see this cannot go on as it is.
If McRae somehow makes it to the end of his second term, that should be the moment the last vestiges of the bowling club mentality and the culture of entitlement disappear.
It is bad enough that Petrie is part of the sub-committee selecting the new manager. If he is allowed to become president, still a hugely influential role, it will surely destroy any remaining hope of getting the public back onside.
He rode the storm at Hibs. He can’t here. The SFA needs to change or die. And that change starts right at the top.