Interview: John Robertson, East Fife FC manager and former Hearts player

Published on Friday 5 November 2010 16:58

Today I'm meeting a man who, by rights, I should hate. Successive Hibee centre-back pairings wet their knickers every time he brought his terrifying gonk powers to bear on an Edinburgh derby.

• John Robertson hopes to get his stalled managerial career back on track at East Fife Picture: Kenny Smith

He more than any other Hearts player was responsible for Jambo domination of a fixture that didn't quite stretch from the Benny Brazil era all the way back to my team's founding, up a High Street close - it only seemed that way. But between 1983 and 1998 he scored the grand and probably unbeatable for evermore total of 27 derby goals. He is, of course, Ernie Winchester.

Ha, just kidding. Ernie Winchester may have been blessed with a great physique and been named after a rifle and a speedy milkman, but he rarely played like it. I'm talking about John Robertson. Perhaps he had Ernie Wise's short, fat hairy legs; didn't matter because he always brought sunshine to the capital's western environs. "It's not over 'til the fat striker scores," he once famously quipped, and for 22 derbies in a row, it wasn't. As I say, I should hate him.

But it is difficult to hate Robbo, just back in football as manager of East Fife, when he tells such a good story. Like the time he was in a car with Paul Kane, his old Hibs rival, on their way to a function. "I was driving and the most direct route was along Gorgie Road. All of a sudden Kane-o grabbed the wheel: 'No Robbo, not this way.' I said we'd be late otherwise, but he wanted me to turn right round and go via Pumpherston, via anywhere. 'Sorry,' he said, 'but I just don't do Gorgie Road. Never have, never will.' This was just a few years ago, long after we'd both quit the game. He told me that even when he was playing he took the long way round. The derby, I think, misses characters like Kane-o."

And it is certainly difficult to hate Robbo when he reveals how he could, and should, have been a Hibby. The stories about the wee man and Hibs have always been tantalising. Didn't he support them as a boy? Weren't his family all fans? Didn't he almost sign for them late in his great career? "Here's what it was," he tells me, in a hotel lounge on a flying visit to Edinburgh from his home in Inverness. "My dad, who died when I was 14, was a Hearts fan. Big brother Chris, who played for them after Rangers, was a Hearts fan. My eldest brother George - could have been a footballer, played in the same Melbourne Thistle team as Gordon Strachan, had trials for Sunderland, then discovered drink and women - supported Hibs. He was, after all, the only one of us seven Robertsons born at Leith Hospital."

Ah George. A few years ago I got a letter from him. He'd read my book about my lost year as a Jambo and I thought he wouldn't like my progressively sillier nicknames for John when he was manager at the start of the Vladimir Romanov reign (Calimero, Throbbo, Dr Ruth). George was amused by them, and told me how he'd taken little brother to watch Hibs as a kid and how a "moment of madness forced John over to Tynie".

"It's true. Aged 15, I'd been training at Easter Road for three years. Eddie Turnbull wanted to sign me; 50 quid a week. With our dad dead, I asked if I could take the contract home for Chris, who by then was at Ibrox, to give it the once-over. But Tom Hart intervened. He had something against Rangers, didn't he? He said: ‘Sign today or you'll never play for this club.' He was adamant, and 48 hours later I joined Hearts."

Thirty-one years later, Chris has given a quarter-century's service to John Lewis while George now works at a convent. "He's some man is George. He took over my dad's job as a boilerman with Scottish & Newcastle but he's the intellect in the family. He's a published poet, you know - a good one. He's just got married for the fourth time. We like to joke that his lawyer is on a retainer and he loves wedding cake but I think he might stick at this one." Now John, whose three sons from his first marriage produce a 2-1 split in affiliations in favour of Hearts, is clocking up 1,000 miles a week travelling from the home he shares with his second wife Sally for training and matches at Bayview. We talk about East Fife, as we should, though I fear I haven't heard the last about his derby tyranny.

"This is my first experience of part-time football and it's definitely got its own subtle challenges," he says. "I've just found out our goalie Stewart Baillie won't be available for our game at Peterhead because of his day job. But I'm kind of in the same boat. My nine to five, the mortgage-payer, is being business development manager with Orion in Inverness. I've told the folk at East Fife I'll start with a short-term contract to see how I cope with the big commute. I don't want to cheat the club or the fans."

Robbo's coaching career thus far has been rumbustious. He was lured to Tynecastle from Inverness, a job which with hindsight he probably shouldn't have left. "Hearts paid 110,000 to take me down the road but I found out later that I was only ever going to be manager for six months." He packed a fair bit into that time: two semi-finals, a Euro adventure - and a YouTube-celebrated kick at future Gorgie boss Csaba Laszlo. There were rows at Ross County and Livingston, and an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal at Derry City which he won, although it left a bitter taste: after the Football Association of Ireland's perceived lack of help in the dispute, he viewed the Thierry Henry handball which knocked the Republic out of the World Cup as "karma".

But there's karma about John Robertson today. He wears gap-year bangles on his wrist and says he's become a more chilled-out character. "The wrangle at Derry during which I couldn't take another job enabled me to step back from football, see it from a fan's perspective and also that of a media pundit, and question why I was always getting into confrontation with boards of directors, referees, everyone.

"When I started in management I was going through a divorce and I was a bit of a loose cannon. My attitude if someone challenged me was: ‘Tough.' And maybe at Hearts I was just too passionate. I felt for John Hughes during his problems at Hibs and could see parallels with my situation at Tynecastle: we were heroes as players and were too desperate to do well as managers and maybe we got those jobs too young.

"I think I've changed. Football's still important to me but quality time with Sally is just as important. We've been married three years and we love our life together. This probably sounds quite poncey but I think I've found myself. I would like to coach again at a high level so it was real nice of East Fife to ask me back into the game but you'll see a more laidback, more thoughtful John Robertson from here on in."

Robbo has vivid memories of Bayview, old and new. A shocking injury to Livingston team-mate Jim Sherry ("His kneecap was halfway up his thigh"), the last-ever match at the Fifers' former home and most vivid of all, his final reserve match for Hearts before being called up to the first team less than 24 hours later at Queen of the South - a substitute's debut aged 17 alongside brother Chris that their father didn't quite live to see. "My biggest regret in life was is that Dad missed those 17 minutes on a cold, wet February's night in Dumfries," he says.

Now I'm worried. If he can remember a reserve game, the fact it finished 0-0, that he was up against Dave Clarke, "a deep-lying sweeper to say the least", and that he played "quite well" - then 27 derby goals are surely going to have their own oak-panelled wing of his memory-banks.

"I remember all of them," he smiles, "and every single one was a deliberate stab through the heart of Hibernian Football Club. Nothing against the fans but you lot have to understand that when Hibs didn't sign me, I wanted revenge. Some folk laugh at that and say: ‘What, all 27?' I suppose maybe 25 were punishment; the other two I banged in just for the hell of it."

His best derby goal? "My first probably, in what was Hearts' first win at Tynecastle for a while. I pulled down Henry Smith's clearance, nutmegged Arthur Duncan and Jackie McNamara Sr and curled it into the top left-hand corner. In my scrapbook the headline under Mike Aitken's match report in The Scotsman was: ‘A new signature on an old masterpiece.'" And as jubilant Jambos anointed their latest derby favourite, George the Hibby was forced to quieten another in green and white who'd taken exception to his callow skill. "This guy shouted ‘Robertson ya b*****d!' so George decked him. ‘You can call him a w*****, you can even call him a ****,' he said, ‘but that's my wee brother who's not long lost his dad so never ever call him a b*****d.'"

Robbo loved the derbies and, under Alex MacDonald especially, Hearts always went into them believing they would win. "Alex knew we weren't the most talented team in the world but he made us the fittest." The pace of the capital clashes was incredible. "Fans say they'd like to be able to play five minutes of a derby. No disrespect, but they wouldn't last five seconds. The speed of Hearts v Hibs, the electricity of the crowd - these things sap your strength.

"Gary Mackay was a lunatic in the build-up to a derby. From Monday training right through the week he'd fly into every tackle. He got so nervous he'd hyperventilate and the night before he wouldn't be able to sleep. The management had to kid him on with a placebo, something to make him calm down a bit. But if you ask Gary, or the other guys who were total fanatics like Kane-o and Gordon Hunter, they'd probably admit they never played great in the derbies. Everything always got too much for them."

For some of the fans, too. In the notorious post-Wallace Mercer takeover-bid derby at Easter Road in 1990, when Hearts raced into a 3-0 lead with Robbo netting two, Andy Goram had to rescue him from a demented pitch-invader. "At half-time the police commissioner came into our dressing-room and warned that if we scored again he'd have to abandon the match. ‘Don't worry, sir,' we said, ‘we're stopping at three.' After he'd gone we were like: ‘Right, as many as we can, lads - we'll live with the abandonment.'"

I try to jolt him out of his derby-domination reverie by mentioning 1986, the year Hearts blew a league-and-cup double. He claims never to have had nightmares, about the fateful day at Dens Park especially, but perhaps this is the new, chilled-out, bangled-up Robbo talking. "It was a disaster, for sure, but there are no regrets. To get within seven minutes of becoming champions, I'd go through it all again."

What, given he's seen the squad up close while coaching the strikers for Jim Jeffries, does he think of Hearts in 2010? "They're a squad, for sure, but way too big. Sixty-five players training every day is far too many. On Sunday, Kilmarnock beat Hearts with their top guys earning around 1,500 a week but Jim has a player who, with his personal bonus on top of the team bonus plus his car and his flat, is costing Hearts 19,000 a week. Who in the squad is really worth that? At the other end of the scale there are young lads who're dying a slow death because they're never going to make the first team. Jim has said if he was given absolute licence to hire and fire, pay off some players and reduce the squad by 20, he could half the wage bill and double the quality."

Staying calm comes easy to John Robertson now and tomorrow at 2.15 he'll be far away from Easter Road.

"Me and Sally will be walking our dogs on Culloden battlefield as usual." I ask how he kept calm during the mayhem of those derbies and have a hunch I won't like the answer.

"Sorry," he says, "but it was pretty easy. I realised right away that calmness was the key to them, the key to scoring derby goals. Because they were so much quicker than other games and there was so much hand-to-hand combat - real mano-a-mano stuff - mistakes would be made. So I'd just try to concentrate on keeping my composure. Another trick which might have worked for me was flattery. I'd tell the Hibs boys: ‘You lot are doing great today, you really should be winning.' Two minutes later - bang. Running back, I'd just give them a wee wink."

Yes, yes, very good, I say. Now shouldn't he be getting back up the road?