Long-serving Hearts physio lifts lid on eventful career at Tynecastle

But while the owner provides the money and the manager picks the team, neither the striker, the goalie nor any of their team-mates would be on the pitch at all if not for the work of the physiotherapist.

The manager may think he knows what makes his players tick, but the physio has far more extensive knowledge – not only of their bodies, but also of their state of mind and how they cope with any physical problems. A good physio can hasten players’ recovery from injury and ensure the entire squad is ideally prepared for every match; a negligent one can make injuries worse and depress morale at his club.

In short, the physio’s is an undervalued role, and an under-reported one too. Now Alan Rae, who held the post at Tynecastle for almost a quarter of a century, has lifted the lid on the profession with Hands On Hearts: A Physio’s Tale.

Rae’s wealth of medical knowledge is evident in the book, and his psychological insight into the players he treated is also much to the fore. But rather than being primarily an autobiography, the book is above all a modern history of Hearts. From the early days of Wallace Mercer’s reign to George Burley’s brief stint as manager, Rae was at the core of the club, a witness to and participant in a host of triumphs and disappointments.

Although he is too modest to say so, it is probably no coincidence that Rae’s 23 years in his job were a period during which Hearts steadily became more professional in their outlook. His arrival in 1982 was at a club who were still languishing in the First Division after a long decline during the previous decade: his departure in 2005 was during the team’s best start to the season since 1914.

There was by no means uninterrupted progress between those two dates. The loss of the league and cup double on successive Saturdays in 1986 was a massive blow to Hearts, and the first half of the 1990s was marked by instability until Jim Jefferies arrived as manager and instilled a renewed sense of purpose at the club.

But the ambition, although often thwarted, was at least there. And there was an ever changing cast of characters, too, for Rae to treat.

Due to a succession of knee injuries which eventually forced his premature retirement, Craig Levein was probably treated more by Rae than any other player, and it is fitting that the former Hearts boss and current Scotland manager should have penned a foreword which sums up Rae’s value. “He was mad as a hatter, completely nuts, but a man for whom I have huge admiration,” Levein writes.

“He wasn’t someone who allowed you to feel sorry for yourself, and that was something which benefited me with my history of knee injuries. He was a hard taskmaster and not very tolerant of people not doing their work properly, which I think is a great thing. The absolute trust I had in him meant that when I was manager I knew he could take charge of situations and didn’t need me breathing down his neck asking questions all the time. I knew Alan was doing everything he could to get players back fit as quickly as possible.”

Some of those players, it should be said, did not always have the wisest approach to health and safety, and Hands On Hearts is a rich source of anecdotes about the more unusual characters who were on the club’s books during the Rae years. There was the English midfielder, for example, who endangered life and limb not on the pitch but off it – by buying a barbecue and failing to realise it was designed for outdoors use only. “When it became apparent his godfather was Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, we should have known it wasn’t going to be plain sailing with this chap around,” Rae writes of Phil ‘Very Chubby’ Stamp.

Hands On Hearts is out now, and will be officially launched today at Tynecastle, where a guest list of some of Rae’s most distinguished former patients is expected to include several ex-Hearts managers.

• Hands On Hearts: A Physio’s Tale, by Alan Rae with Paul Kiddie, is published by Luath Press at £14.99.