Master and pupil reunited at Firhill

MIKE AITKEN

ALTHOUGH he hopes to cause his old sparring partner a few problems when their paths cross at Firhill in a third round Tennent’s Scottish Cup tie, Jimmy Bone, newly appointed as Dick Campbell’s assistant at Partick Thistle this week, has fond memories of the days when he showed the Hearts manager, John Robertson, a few tricks of the trade.

Under the management of Alex MacDonald and Sandy Jardine, Hearts looked to senior professionals such as Bone and Willie Johnston in the Eighties to help them bring out the best in a promising group of youngsters, which included Robertson, Craig Levein, Gary Mackay and David Bowman.

As a seasoned centre-forward, Bone saw it as part of his brief to help the slightly built, diminutive striker who played alongside him develop into one of the most lethal finishers of the past 25 years. Like the straight man who sets up a comic to deliver the punchline, Bone was Jack Milroy to Robertson’s Rikki Fulton.

The coach often quipped about his time with Hearts that he fully expected the junior member of the strike force to do all the running around and make him look good. Instead, it was the veteran who shouldered the donkey work and the young forward who emerged as a thoroughbred. "It definitely turned out the opposite way to what I’d expected," he grins.

The striker, who first made his name as part of the Thistle side which won the League Cup in 1971, was astute enough to understand how the precocious Robertson’s natural instinct for scoring goals meant the younger man was at his most dangerous when deployed in the penalty box.

"John was a really good listener and if you told him something it stuck - he was one of those lads where you didn’t need to say the same thing over and over again," Bone recalled. "He would go away and try it out and then come back and say ‘aye, you were right’. Another thing we had to do was teach him how to look after himself on the pitch. If you were his size as a front player, you need to know how to handle yourself. As it turned out, John learned that lesson extremely well.

"Whatever wee aspects of the game we helped him with, though, the most important thing about John Robertson was his finishing and no-one taught him that. It was instinctive and he did it as well as anyone. At the start, I used to remind him that because he was such a prolific goalscorer, he had to concentrate on getting himself into the penalty box. The way our partnership worked best was if I went and got the ball. It would then come into John. If I ended up being the grafter, it was because John was a finisher and I wasn’t."

The little and large combination of Bone and Robertson, in the estimation of the more experienced man, enjoyed their finest moments together as a partnership in the September of 1983 when they combined to score all three goals for Hearts in a notable 3-2 win over Hibs. This was the era when the Edinburgh rivals had not met in the top flight for a number of seasons.

Although he insists he was never exactly a pale youth, Bone is thrilled to be back at the place where he first made his name.

"You never forget your first love in football and Partick were mine. Coming back here as Dick’s assistant is a wonderful opportunity."

"As for Hearts, I always regarded John as a thinker and talker about the game who was destined to become a manager. And whatever happens on the pitch, we’ll enjoy a post-match beer afterwards."

Taken from the Scotsman