Extract from Hearts: Diary of an Incredible Season

June 2005.

I lay on the sunlounger in my back garden with the sun beating down on my weed-strewn lawn, The Undertones on the MP3 player and a can of John Smith's bitter at my feet.

'So,' I said to the infamous Mrs Smith as she struggled with the lawn-mower, 'do you fancy a long weekend in Dublin?'

'When?' she snapped in her own inimitable style.

'How about the second weekend in July? I'll see if I can get a couple of days off work and we can spend a few nights in the Emerald Isle.'

She gave me that all-too familiar wry look but changed her mood with all the speed of a Paul Hartley free kick as she considered her reply. 'All right,' she sniped, 'even I know there's no football at that time of year so I know you won't disappear like you normally do.'

Hearts: Diary of an Incredible Season

We flew out from Edinburgh airport on the morning of Saturday 9 July. Her suspicions where aroused when she spotted more than one passenger on the Ryanair flight wearing a Hearts top. By the time we reached Dublin city centre, less than ninety minutes later the game was up.

'There's a bloody Hearts game on, isn't there?'

Of course there was. And so began a most remarkable season, that of 2005/2006, which had its beginnings in Hearts pre-season tour of the Republic of Ireland and a friendly against old European adversaries, St Patrick's Athletic. Barely a fortnight earlier, Hearts supporters were in turmoil. The summer of 2005 had seen little respite from the drama that had engulfed Hearts for the last twelve months.

The summer of 2004 had seen a host of players leave the club and just two - Ramon Pereira and Jamie McAllister - arrive. Head Coach Craig Levein had yet again seen his budget for players slashed and one wondered how many more miracles the big Fifer could produce. With Hearts' debt approaching £19m, season 2004/05 was being signalled by Chief Executive Chris Robinson as the club's last at its spiritual home - Tynecastle Stadium. Plans were afoot to sell Tynecastle to property developers and to move Hearts to Murrayfield stadium - home of Scottish Rugby and an arena with a 67,500 capacity that would have more than 50,000 empty seats for most home games. The fans were in uproar. Robinson was never going to win any popularity awards in Gorgie but he turned into something of a hate figure with this latest half-baked idea. Fans held protest marches, the Save Our Hearts campaign worked tirelessly to fight the sale of Tynecastle and fans were genuinely concerned that a famous football institution was about to be served its last rites.

Although the decision to sell the famous old stadium was taken by the board of directors, many fans saw Robinson as the villain of the piece. Only a year earlier, the Chief Executive had proposed Hearts selling Tynecastle and moving to Straiton, on the outskirts of Edinburgh to share a 30,000 capacity stadium with a team from Leith. Whilst the location would have seen Heart of Midlothian actually playing in Midlothian, this grand idea was never going to see the light of day with far too many obstacles such as planning permission and the possibility of old mine shafts on the land identified for the stadium to be overcome.

When Hibernian announced they had no intention of leaving the cultural metropolis that is Leith, the Straiton project was dead in the water. With the huge debt crippling the club, desperation set in. Chris Robinson and his board of directors then signed a tentative agreement with a housing association to sell Tynecastle for £24 million. With Tynecastle Park being reduced to rubble, Hearts would move to Murrayfield - with no visible sign of a plan to build a custom-built stadium or any alternative scheme that would rescue the club from certain oblivion. Many fans had stopped going to Hearts games as a result of the board's policies in any case - how many more would desert the club if it moved to the homeland of Scottish rugby?

Considering the circumstances, Head Coach Craig Levein produced astonishing feats during his four years as the man responsible for managing the playing side at Tynecastle. In 2003, he secured arguably Hearts best-ever result in European competition by leading the Maroons to a fantastic 1-0 win in Bordeaux. That was a memorable occasion for me - second only to seeing Hearts win the Scottish Cup. The day trip we had to the south of France was one of those days of perfection one encounters as a Hearts supporter. A day trip of the home of vintage French wine, temperatures in the 70s and this was early November, a brilliant day in the Connemara Bar in the heart of Bordeaux (three thousand Jambos did what only three thousand Jambos can do in the south of France - they headed to an Irish pub!), the march to the stadium, the fantastic atmosphere - and Mark de Vries scoring the winner with ten minutes to go. Inevitably, Hearts did self-destruct in the return leg at Tynecastle, going down 2-0 to go out of the UEFA Cup 2-1 on aggregate, but that day in France will never be forgotten by those who were there.

Just ten months later, Levein led Hearts to another memorable UEFA Cub victory over Sporting Braga (another fantastic day trip which goes into Gorgie folklore) which meant participation in the potentially lucrative group stages with games against Feyenoord, Schalke 04 and Ferencvaros. When it became clear that Levein would get none of this additional revenue to spend on the team, he left for Leicester City. He would soon take Hearts players Mark de Vries, Patrick Kisnorbo and, most damaging of all, Alan Maybury with him.

The fans were in despair. Our talented Head Coach had gone, some of our best players went with him and our beloved stadium was about to be turned into luxury flats. But, like Clint Eastwood riding into town in a spaghetti western, Russian businessman Vladimir Romanov then rode into Gorgie. By February 2005, he had bought a controlling interest in Hearts, the £19m debt was transferred to the Ūkio Bankas (meaning no more selling of players just to make the interest repayments) and all talk of demolishing Tynecastle ceased. Hearts were staying put!

Extract from Hearts: Diary of an Incredible Season by Mike Smith, pages 1 to 5, printed with permission from Black & White Publishing, Edinburgh.