Rod Petrie's influence on Hibs and Scottish football spans from living-room squad summit to Hampden

Petrie, who died on Thursday evening aged 69, often never had his troubles to seek, either with Hibs or, latterly, as president of the Scottish Football Association. But his influence will always be traced in the Edinburgh city skyline given his central part in the redevelopment of Easter Road, as well as quite literally on ground level. Petrie sanctioned the realignment of the pitch in 2000, including correcting the notorious Easter Road slope.

He would continue altering the landscape at Hibs for many years and was the driving force behind the club’s game-changing decision to build a new training ground near Tranent, which was opened in late 2009. He found, acquired and developed the plans for the site. I remember being invited to Easter Road to for a personal summit with Petrie, manager Tony Mowbray and then commercial director Colin McNeill and noting Petrie’s visibly flushed face as he pointed out every minute detail before then engaging in a comical battle to fold the flapping plans. His excitement was well-founded.

Nevertheless, only very few journalists will be able to write the-Rod-Petrie-I-knew tribute pieces since he gave so little of himself away. Interview requests were invariably politely declined. He inspired devotion, however, from friends and colleagues, who saw the real Rod. “His sense of duty and service to all things Hibernian was quite remarkable,” McNeill told me.

There was one perhaps ill-judged joint bid with Hearts to move to a new shared stadium at Straiton. The plan was announced in 2003 at an extraordinary press conference in Edinburgh’s New Town with Petrie and his Hearts counterpart Chris Robinson sitting side by side on big chairs. It was scrapped within months following a fan-engagement process.

It was 1996 when Petrie’s name first started regularly appearing in relation to Hibs and Scottish football, after he was made a non-executive director at Easter Road. A merchant banker with Edinburgh-based firm Quayle Munro who had grown up on a farm in the north-east of Scotland, he had not previously been a conspicuous presence in football’s orbit.

Tom Farmer’s right-hand man

Over the course of the next quarter of a century, however, he was often in the news – and in the firing line – as Hibs owner Tom Farmer’s right-hand man before taking on a supposedly less fraught role at Hampden.

“Rod will be responsible for the day-to-day management of Hibernian, which includes the holding company, the property company, the football team and the club,” outlined Farmer after installing Petrie in the newly-created position of chief executive of the club in April 1997. “The only thing he won’t do is pick the team.”

He might have faced many criticisms in subsequent years, but that remained true. A succession of managers, some of whom he had to brutally fire, including Franck Sauzee, could not accuse him of interference on the playing side. When Petrie, then operating in a dual chairman and chief executive role, was spotted at Hibs’ training ground on the eve of an Edinburgh derby in April 2014, with Hibs having to fight for their top-flight future against their already relegated rivals, it raised eyebrows. It turned out manager Terry Butcher had invited him. “The chairman came down and watched training, which I don’t think he has ever done before," Butcher explained. “They employ me and they don’t see how I work.”

After Hibs duly slipped out of the league, following a devastating play-off defeat to Hamilton Accies, Butcher wasn’t employed at Hibs much longer. Petrie became well-practised in hiring and firing managers although it was never a job he relished.

Of course, for all that he did not insist on certain players playing or ever question tactics, no review of Petrie’s time at Hibs can fail to mention the occasion he held an impromptu squad meeting at his house in East Lothian amid general unhappiness at manager John Collins’ methods.

It was to Petrie’s credit that he sought to quell the mutinous vibes by inviting the players into his lounge for a chat although he later regretted the optics: it looked like he was conspiring behind Collins’ back.

When the Hibs squad visited Petrie

When Scott Brown telephoned him to relay players’ feelings, following a defeat to St Mirren, Petrie told him his door was always open. Cue around 20 of the Hibs first-team squad arranging themselves on and around the furniture of the chief exec’s home a couple of weeks later.

Having made various notes on, famously, a flipchart, Petrie wondered what might make things better. “Just sack him!” blurted out Brown, with an additional expletive further shattering the genteel atmosphere of Petrie’s well-appointed front room. “Now, now Scott,” Petrie is said to have responded. “I think that might possibly be a bit extreme.”

Collins eventually resigned in December 2007, citing lack of transfer funds. Slightly awkwardly, he did so just 24 hours after posing for photographs alongside Petrie and Farmer at the opening of the new training ground.

Perhaps Petrie was the victim of his own success. He had struck gold with Mowbray, the previous manager, whom he had targeted and recruited along with then director Stephen Dunn. Collins, though it can’t be forgotten he lifted the League Cup in 2007, had a hard time living up to the promise and excitement of the Mowbray era.

It would, however, get worse before it got better. Even seeming successes became sticks to beat those in power with. It might have been better not to have reached the Scottish Cup final in 2012 in view of how it turned out, with Hearts rolling over their rivals 5-1.

Pat Fenlon eventually left, as did Butcher, who was Hibs’ 11th manager in 15 years and the first one since 1998 to get them relegated.

That day at Hampden - ‘exuberance’

Petrie ended up recusing himself from involvement in managerial selection procedures and after Leeann Dempster was appointed chief executive, Petrie became chairman and moved away from operational decisions. However, he was firmly back in the limelight following Hibs’ epic Scottish Cup win of 2016 against Rangers, when he defended the pitch invasion by Hibs fans and put it down to “114 years of exuberance”. He later struck a more conciliatory tone when condemning the violent acts that took place as rival fans clashed, perhaps with half an eye on his post-Hibs life.

His candidacy as SFA president was ratified in June 2019, shortly before Farmer sold Hibs to Peru-born businessman Ron Gordon. It might have been Petrie's long-held ambition to take such high office but it sadly proved poorly timed – for him at least.

He might well have been the right man at the right time for Scottish football, given his head for figures and calm, unflappable demeanour. He counted all 42 senior clubs in at the start of the pandemic and counted them all out again although he had to step away for a period for “planned surgery”. He resumed his presidency just a few months later before stepping down at the end of his four-year term in 2023, when he was replaced by Mike Mulraney.

There was a rumour he was investigating getting back involved with football. Talks were held with a lower league club. Again, such reports flew in the face of the ridiculous claim that he had no real feeling for the game. So, too, did his continued quiet attendance at Hibs matches in the Famous Five Stand, where he paid for his own season ticket.

It delighted him that, having returned to games midway through last season following more cancer treatment, he never saw the resurgent Hibs lose.