Hearts chairman must think again.

£50,000 offer that McLean can refuse

KEN GALLACHER

20 Jul 1995

THE feud which sees Hearts and their manager, Tommy McLean, locked in combat will not be settled easily despite some claims that McLean was ready to leave the club with a massive cash settlement.

The truth, of course, is different.

There has been no huge offer to McLean.

He has been offered something in the order of £50,000 when he still has a two-year contract worth almost four times that.

I know that Hearts' chairman Chris Robinson believes he is being fair in what he has put on the table, but he shows little knowledge of what the game is about.

Tommy McLean has a contract.

He still has two years of that contract to run and, obviously, he must look for a pay-off which reflects that.

The problem at Tynecastle is that the club do not have enough money to pay him off, and then get on with the business of running what was once a great football institution.

Yesterday, I understand, the chairman began to talk to out-of-contract players, something which usually falls within the province of the manager.

He spoke to Neil Berry about a fresh deal and spoke to agent Bill McMurdo about two of his clients, John Robertson and Scott Leitch.

Other talks were postponed, but these moves would suggest that Robinson is ready to take over the running of the club even as McLean considers an offer which I am told has been described by his advisers as "peanuts."

There is no doubt that McLean had offered to resign on several occasions.

Once he did so when Hearts were ready to sell defender Alan McLaren for just £750,000.

He took a stand, won the day and the club eventually received double that amount.

On another occasion, he opposed the sale of Tosh McKinlay to Celtic as he tried to keep a team together.

The Hearts' directors may have misread his signals, just as they misread the situation they inherited from the outgoing chief, Wallace Mercer.

That, however, is not McLean's problem.

He went to Hearts ready to do a job, to rebuild the club just as he had done at Motherwell over the years.

The problems which ensued were not of his making.

Nor are the problems which exist now.

Tommy McLean was promised a budget to strengthen his squad.

That did not appear.

Instead, some of his major assets were sold, and he found himself asked to make do and mend, hardly the scenario he had been promised.

Now, as the boardroom battles continue, Hearts are foundering.

If Robinson wants to be rid of what he appears to see as his "meddlesome" manager, he will have to up the offer he has placed on the table and match it with the one he made when his ambitions seemed higher than they now appear to be.

Taken from the Herald