Fans remember all too well Rix's Chelsea hotel

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I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. So goes the first line of a Leonard Cohen ballad which then describes an activity that, when undertaken with a girl a few weeks short of her 16th birthday - as in Graham Rix's case, when he was a 41-year-old coach at Chelsea in 1998 - constitutes an illegal act.

Rix, as the world has been reminded, served six months in prison but was subsequently employed by four football clubs - Chelsea again, Portsmouth, Oxford United and Wolves. He was allowed to rehabilitate himself more or less unhindered until he came to Hearts. The furore in Scotland over his appointment, in marked contrast to the absence of such reaction south of the border, warrants an attempt at explanation.

Perhaps Scotland is more puritan or prurient than the rest of the UK but Rix was briefly a guest coach at Dundee and there was no allergic response to his presence there. Dundee, though, did not generate the sensation provided by Hearts this season. Tynecastle has been Scottish football's hothouse, with a succession of plot lines for which a TV soap writer would strike a bargain with the devil.

Locked on points with Celtic at the top of the SPL as the title campaign wears into winter, Hearts are far ahead of Rangers in the race for a lucrative Champions League place next season. The manager who took them there was ejected, as were the equally popular chief executive and chairman - for the record, once again, George Foulkes was stripped of the chairmanship and offered a lesser function, which he declined - at the same time as the majority shareholder, Vladimir Romanov, pledged to win the Champions League within three years.

In Scotland, where media competition is even more intense than in England - all the main English titles are represented, alongside a voracious domestic press - Hearts have become fair game. They swell Scottish football crowds; they boost TV subscriptions and, above all, they sell newspapers.

Hearts are not sardines for seagulls but live prey for sharks. True, Rix was an object of pontification while still at Chelsea. Mad Frankie Fraser, to whom longevity has granted a role as the Queen Muvver of London gangsterdom, declared (on his website) that Chelsea's reinstatement of Rix was an "act of men of the world".

Mind you, one suspects that had the 15-year-old girl been a scion of the house of Fraser, Mad Frankie would have reached for his shooter or, at the very least, a baseball bat. Still, the sheer volume of vituperation currently aimed at Rix must owe something to the fact that his installation disappointed the Hearts fans, who feel that Romanov had led them to expect a coach with greater pedigree.

At the extreme is the raddled Greek chorus outside Tynecastle this week, howling on cue for the TV cameras that Rix is a paedophile. More rationally, those who monitor the media's portrayal of women are represented by the deputy editor of the Herald, who used her column in the Glasgow paper yesterday to write: "Sorry, Mr Rix, but we can't shrug off your sex crimes."

But who, on this week's evidence, has shrugged them off? In one household, certainly, there is forgiveness for Rix. Linda, his second wife, has a teenage daughter from her previous marriage, to whom Rix is, by all accounts, a caring and thoughtful step-father.

I guess, with their support, he will survive at Hearts, at least until results go against him.

For my part, as father of a daughter about to turn 15, I hope that the young girl at the centre of the court case has found peace and stability seven years down the line.

After all, she must also remember - all too vividly - the Chelsea hotel.

Taken from telegraph.co.uk