WHEN Chris Robinson took over at Hearts 11 years ago, he was welcomed by supporters largely for a negative reason - he was not Wallace Mercer. That welcome did not last long, but the negativity did, culminating in the turmoil last year over the proposed sale of Tynecastle.

After the dramatic season in 1985-86, when Hearts came close to winning the league and reached the Scottish Cup final, Mercer had gradually fallen out of favour with the club's fans. Other supporters were not too fond of him, either - particularly those of Hibs after his attempted buy-out. By 1994, change was long overdue, and Mercer himself had become eager to sell out.

Robinson and Leslie Deans, both successful Edinburgh businessmen in their early 40s, finally clinched the deal to take over. They presented the image of a harmonious partnership, one in which the interests of Hearts predominated over individual ambition, and as a token of that harmony agreed to rotate the chairmanship.

For a while the duopoly appeared to work, never more so than in May 1998, when Hearts won the Scottish Cup. Yet even by that time, the off-field problems were growing.

The turnover of footballing and backroom staff had been a cause of some disquiet in the first year of the new regime, as had an acrimonious fall-out with Mercer. The following year, 1996, Robinson tried to take the Hearts team off the pitch at Ibrox after four of them had been sent off.

Such officiousness would become a more visible aspect of Robinson's character in the subsequent years, and did nothing to win him and the club friends in Scottish football. Of more fundamental importance than this failing, however, was his inability to maintain the club on a sound financial footing.

In later years, Robinson would claim with some justification that Hearts had not been the only club to spend too much on their wage bill. Others had also gone down the "speculate to accumulate" road, only to find they were accumulating little but debt. There were, however, key differences between Robinson and most of his peers in the Premier League.

First, none of them ended up proposing homelessness as a "solution" to their clubs' indebtedness. And second, no-one other than Robinson had the gall to claim, as indebtedness deepened, that the situation was under control.

This ability to call black white and persuade some of his audience that their eyes must be deceiving them was one of the most useful of Robinson's characteristics, at least in the short term. In the longer term, it led to a serious loss of credibility.

A few months after that historic Scottish Cup win, the club announced its debt had gone up from £1.9 million to £5.48million. Over the following six years that figure would continue to grow irresistibly until it reached the £20m mark.

Robinson thought he had found the answer in 1999 when, at a time of burgeoning media interest in football, he persuaded the SMG group to invest in Hearts. £4m was a straight investment, to go partly towards the building of the sports academy at Riccarton, while £4.5m was a loan which was intended to be converted into shares.

Deans, who earlier that year had stood down as chairman, quit the board in protest at the SMG deal, which he saw as injurious to the club. His relationship with Robinson became acrimonious, and on several occasions he and/or associates tried to buy Robinson out.

Prominent supporters - and indeed players - were also falling out with Robinson. In March 1999 John Borthwick of the Federation of Hearts Supporters' Clubs called for his resignation, while in late 2000, Paul Ritchie, by then an ex-Hearts defender, said the chief executive was the main hindrance to the club's attempts to make progress.

At the annual general meeting at the end of 2000, Robinson made the move which would eventually lead to his downfall - claiming that Hearts had to leave Tynecastle. At various times over the ensuing years, Straiton, Sighthill, Murrayfield and other sites were cited as Hearts' best hope of a viable new home.

At every turn, however, Robinson created a rod for his own back because of his tendency to oversell. When Straiton was his preferred option, for example, he wrote Murrayfield off as unsuitable for football. He would be reminded of such statements when, later on, he decided that the home of Scottish rugby should become Hearts' home.

He would also be reminded of a comment he made in 2001. As debts continued to rise, Robinson promised: "If our figures are not significantly better next year, you will have to be speaking to a new chief executive."

The figures were not significantly better - not, that is, by any normal standards. But Robinson's interpretation of reality bore little relation to those standards, and so he hung on.

By that time, with television revenues having fallen and the transfer market having imploded in the wake of the Bosman ruling, it was becoming increasingly clear that Hearts were being sucked into a financial black hole. Although able to put on a brave face when confronted with a frighteningly bleak balance sheet, Robinson could offer no real solution. He was out of his depth - and refused to recognise that.

It was the classic position of many men who have built up their own businesses. Having got so far on his own, Robinson refused to recognise when he could go no further. And, far from being able or willing to recruit outside help, he had developed a spectacular knack of alienating just about every potentially interested party.

And for all that he became enamoured of the positions he held on the Scottish Football Association, and of the status that went with them, Robinson had strained relations with counterparts at other SPL clubs.

His relationship with the press was even worse. Attacks on newspapers would appear on the club website, and he would justify the approach by saying that he was sticking up for his club, while only succeeding in further alienating one of the main sources of free publicity for Hearts.

To outsiders, the whole process seemed scarcely credible, but anyone who did any digging of their own soon found it to be true. For example, one journalist of charitable bent, believing Robinson could not be so bad as reports were suggested, turned up early at Tynecastle on a matchday and came across the chief executive outside the dressing-rooms. He tried to strike up a friendly, lighthearted conversation, but was astounded to find that within 30 seconds Robinson had picked an argument with him.

It was not an isolated incident, nor one confined to members of the press. Supporters and corporate clients told the same story: it was as if Robinson had a compulsion to disagree with people.

But he fought hard to win his arguments. Even his opponents would credit him with that.

After the intention to sell Tynecastle was announced in November 2003, supporters opposed to the move slowly coalesced into the Save Our Hearts campaign. With demonstrations going on both inside and outside the ground from February 2004, Robinson for some time withstood severe pressure to walk away.

His approach was as confrontational as ever, and as a result, fatally flawed. When supporters rebelled against his intention to sell the club's ground, he reacted by producing a hastily compiled, and thinly transparent, document titled Tynecastle Stadium "Not Fit For Purpose". The contents would have been laughable had the situation not been so serious.

Each argument Robinson put forward as a reason to sell the ground was contradicted. First, the pitch was said to be too small for UEFA matches, so the club had to find a new home. UEFA later confirmed that European games could be played at another stadium (Murrayfield).

Then the main stand at the Gorgie ground was said to be a safety hazard. A letter had to be issued by the City of Edinburgh Council to assure worried fans that, in fact, engineers were "entirely satisfied" that the stand was sound.

At an agm during the height of the battle over Tynecastle, Robinson claimed that the rent at Murrayfield would be almost as much on a one-off basis as it would be for an entire season. Not so, the Scottish Rugby Union confirmed the next day.

And when Robinson's preferred new home for the club switched from Straiton to Murrayfield, he confessed to the club's agm that previously he had misled supporters deliberately over the suitability of Murrayfield, to make Straiton a more attractive option. "That's my job," he said by way of justification when asked about the inconsistency of his position.

Eventually, though, he was outflanked. George Foulkes, the MP brought in to succeed Doug Smith as chairman in April 2004, gave Robinson enough rope to hang himself by allowing him to explain why it would be impossible to make Tynecastle UEFA-compliant unless "millions of pounds" were spent. Foulkes then invited Jim Clydesdale, the stadium architect, to respond. Clydesdale described how it was perfectly possible to alter the pitch dimensions, and Robinson's arguments lost what little credibility they had left.

Tynecastle is now being adapted at minimum cost to meet sufficient UEFA standards.

Foulkes won a year's stay of execution for Tynecastle, knowing it would buy more time to seek new investment in the club. And, when Vladimir Romanov came up with that investment later in the year, there was only one exit strategy available to Robinson.

Overwhelmingly, the Hearts support will be glad to see the back of him, the only real difference being between those who wish he had not received a penny for his shares, and those who would gladly offer him any amount to go. The Romanov era can now begin in earnest. While some of the principal shareholder's ambitions are on the grandiose side, they are at least positive dreams. As such, they provide a liberating contrast to the near disaster with which the club flirted during Robinson's decade at the helm.

Taken from the Scotsman