It was Tynecastle or bust for Foulkes

BY APRIL of last year, the battle for the soul of Hearts had reached a bitter stalemate. On one side, the board of directors wanted to press ahead with the sale of Tynecastle and the move to Murrayfield: on the other, much of the support had mobilised behind the Save Our Hearts umbrella body, which was running an increasingly well-organised campaign to keep the club at the ground and to get rid of the chief executive, Chris Robinson.

As opposition to the proposed move grew ever stronger, Doug Smith, the chairman, decided he had had enough, and resigned. His replacement was George Foulkes, the veteran MP and Hearts season-ticket holder.

The initial impression on many of those who opposed the board was that in Foulkes they had a formidable opponent, one whose political nous and contacts would be put to good use. That impression was strengthened when, at the conference to announce his arrival, Foulkes chatted away happily with Robinson.

Looking back on that day 14 months ago, however, Foulkes explained that the reality was drastically different from the appearance. From the day he took over, his task was to get his boardroom colleagues to agree to stay an extra year at Tynecastle - a decision which, he knew, would give the club the time to look for a way to remain there in the longer term too.

"I was sitting quietly, happily, in Seat 15, Row 8, Block D of the Wheatfield Stand every second Saturday afternoon, concerned about the proposal to move to Murrayfield, but genuinely not seeing myself as a player in it," he recalled of the period immediately before he took office.

"So the offer to become chairman really did come out of the blue. I found out later - a lot of people kept asking me 'Where did your name come from? Why were you asked?' - from Doug Smith that it was Jim Gilchrist, the Tory councillor [for Murrayfield], who said 'Why don't you see if George Foulkes will do it?'

"Clearly the club was in difficulties, and Doug wanted to resign. So I got this call, and was told not just to be on the board, but as chairman.

"I took advice from lots of friends, all of whom said no, you'd be totally mad to do it. Then afterwards when I said I would do it, they all said well we knew you were going to do it, but we thought we'd give you some words of wisdom.

"I took it on one condition, and that was I would be able to argue the case for staying at Tynecastle. But I'm sure they [his fellow-directors] knew that if I didn't win that argument, I wouldn't be staying.

"We did have a genuine debate about it, and staying for an extra year wasn't a foregone conclusion. But I think they knew that if they didn't let me have my way on that they'd have to find someone else. What was it Lady Bracknell said?: To lose one chairman was a misfortune, to lose two would have looked like carelessness.

"I'm sure that before I joined some of the board thought they could persuade me of the arguments for going to Murrayfield - and because of my street cred or political nous or whatever I would then be able to persuade the punters in a way that Doug Smith couldn't, because I was known to be a season-ticket holder.

"But I soon disabused them of that, and made it clear that it wasn't just the opportunity to argue the case I wanted, I had to win the case as well."

He did win the case, but only in the teeth of a fierce rearguard action by Robinson and his colleagues. Despite a poll showing a majority of fans would not renew their season tickets if the rugby ground became Hearts' home, the old board had somehow convinced themselves that there was merit in the move.

"The first decision we made was to stay at Tynecastle for a further year. They did argue against it, and there were a number of people who, possibly because they had been arguing it for so long, actually believed that the move to Murrayfield was the right thing for the club to do.

"They kept on arguing the case. There was an argument that, while we might lose some of our 'traditional' supporters, once we got to the gentler atmosphere of Murrayfield we might attract some people who thought those traditional supporters were too boisterous and rough, and we might get some rugby supporters as well. I'm absolutely sure that was a naive assumption, but they had genuinely come to believe it was a strong argument."

As he battled to delay the sale of the ground, Foulkes was essentially fighting on two fronts. Besides the opposition of his colleagues, he also had to cope with some fairly fiery criticism from fans.

As a seasoned politician, Foulkes is well aware of the value of remaining on good terms with someone if at all possible. For some supporters, his ability to treat Robinson with courtesy suggested he was little more than the soft cop to the chief executive's hardliner. "All the time I kept saying to Save Our Hearts, even while some of them were abusing me - which they did, although all of them subsequently apologised and we've become very good friends - that outside events helped. There was clearly this antagonism towards moving, which helped me to argue the case.

"Time was on my side, because as time moved on it became more difficult to orchestrate a move to Murrayfield and easier just to have another sale of season tickets for Tynecastle. So the longer I could stall it, the more likely I was to get the right decision.

"But I took quite a bit of personal abuse during the course of doing that, not only from some of the fans who imagined I was a Robinson puppet, but also from other quarters within the board. It was tough going, and people around me who knew I was under a lot of pressure, and suffering, thought I would just pack my bags and walk away because I had nothing to lose. I was getting nothing out of it financially and had kept my ticket for the stand.

"But I think people underestimated my determination to get it through and not to fail, because I felt very strongly it was something that needed to be done.

"It was a strategy to give us an opportunity to stay there for more than a year. Even now, I'm still not sure whether in the longer term it is the right solution for the club. But the debate about it needs to be a collective debate with all of the stakeholders in the club - a debate where people are not arguing the case for reasons other than the interests of the club.

"Everyone knew that once we'd decided to delay the move from Tynecastle for a year there was a chance that it was going to be longer. No-one knew what was going to enable it to be longer term."

As a man of good will, who tends to believe the best of people until it is proven otherwise, Foulkes probably underestimated Robinson's resolve. He may have wanted to stay at Tynecastle from day one of his reign as chairman, but he also found it hard at first to appreciate the antipathy felt by many fans towards the chief executive.

It was perhaps only after sustained dialogue with the fans that he truly understood the depth of the schism between the support base and the board, and the breadth of opposition to the ground sale. "The other members of the board thought it was just a small group of fans who were involved in the campaign to keep Hearts at Tynecastle, but it wasn't.

"All right, a small number were organising it, but the protests were widespread. Even some of the people who didn't like the protests wanted to keep us at Tynecastle.

"All sorts of people did. I got a long letter from [Lord Chancellor] Charlie Falconer congratulating me on my appointment, saying he was a long-term Hearts supporter, his dad had taken him, and the one thing I must do is keep the club at Tynecastle."

With Robinson still on the board, Foulkes remains circumspect in his remarks about his supposed colleague. He was taken aback at the time by some of the tactics employed, but now, with the battle won, he sees no point in recriminations.

"I think I probably underestimated the lengths to which some other directors would go to try and get their way - I do start off thinking the best of people until proved otherwise. They were very determined to get their own way, but I think at the end of the day, not necessarily for the same reasons, each of them came round to the view that the move to Murrayfield couldn't go ahead.

"One by one they began to get cold feet about it. They knew that if the predictions were accurate - about the slump in season-ticket sales and the lack of atmosphere at Murrayfield - it would cause them a lot of problems.

"There was a bit of a resurgence of the argument later when the European matches proved to be relatively successful. The attendances were good, the atmosphere wasn't as cavernous as had been feared, and the corporate facilities were very good - that rekindled the desire to keep the Murrayfield option open. But not for long."

Not for long indeed, because by the time the UEFA Cup games came round, the prospect of a far brighter future for Hearts had arrived in the shape of Vladimir Romanov.

Taken from the Scotsman