Chief Executive Officer Andrew McKinlay sat down with Hearts TV this week in his latest CEO quarterly update.
Touching on a myriad of subjects, Andrew’s interview can be found in full on both Hearts TV and the Official Hearts YouTube channel.
In a rush? Find the headlines below…
On targets for this season:
We've not changed our goals, and that might sound a little blunt. We still want to get to a Scottish Cup semi-final, at the very least. Obviously, we want to do better than that, but that's the way we budget.
For the League, we've not changed, and people might think that's just ridiculous. We’re early still, I'm not changing our ambition to be third, but I'm not daft that that's not going to be easy, because we can do so much. We can improve a lot, and we can get a lot more points.
I think the first thing, though, we need to do it in bite-sized chunks, and we're not that far away from the top six, bizarrely. So I think if we can pick up a few wins, we can start climbing, get into the top six, and then let's see where we are.
On Neil Critchley’s impact:
The (first) game against the Rangers, we should have won that game. I don't think any of us could foresee what would then happen. And without going over it again, unfortunately, we just went through a very, very bad spell.
And unfortunately, we had to make a change, which we did. And obviously we, and it's been well documented a lot, that we now have Neil in. And I'm delighted for Neil.
A couple of wins, two really good wins. I thought, I'm not sure even in my time here I've ever seen us play in the way we did in the first 30 minutes against Omonoia. And I looked at their directors at half time and genuinely they looked absolutely shell-shocked. Now you always go in and think, oh gosh, right, second half.
And to be fair, I spoke to Neil and he said, yeah, we were thinking that too as to what are they going to do now? But that was great.
Neil's main relationship in the club will be with Graeme Jones when Graeme starts. They're already forging a decent relationship.
I think, as I've said many times, Graeme has been heavily involved in the appointment of Neil. And as I said, they already have a very, very good relationship. I'm really enjoying my conversations with Neil.
I think everyone will see this in the way he speaks in his interviews. He's very calm, very relaxed about things and has a clear way of doing things. And I really like and really enjoy what he's bringing to the club. And I think he'll bring great success to the club.
On progress in Europe:
From a European perspective, our ambition this year was to get…in fact, from a financial perspective, we budgeted for two wins. Everyone's talking about us having windfalls of money.
Well, no, actually, what we've done so far is what we budgeted for. Anything now will be helpful, because we didn't budget for it. We also took the view that, looking at the simulations previously, that six or seven points should definitely be enough to get us into the play-off round.
So we're on the verge of that already, which is just brilliant, but we're not complacent, and I don't want us to rely on the final game against Petrocub, which everyone's still saying, well, that's a definite. I don't see any reason why we can't do anything in all of the games. I think we've got an opportunity, and that would be great.
Let's now aim to see if we're higher up that play-off bit in the middle or even make that top eight, which is where we're sitting at the moment, which would take you straight to the last 16. That would be a phenomenal achievement. The way we played against Omonoia, if we can play like that against any of the other teams we're up against, I think we'll stand a really good chance.
On plans for January:
We are hoping to do some business in January. What I would say is that we‘ve got a big squad. I’m not saying people have to go for people to come in but it puts demands on the manager to manage such a big squad.
I think Neil’s certainly of the view that he would prefer a smaller squad. We might not manage that in January and that’s fine, January is a difficult time, but we’ve already identified one person that we’re looking very closely at.
Will we get them? Who knows. We will try and strengthen and then we’ll look towards the summer. We were already planning for the summer as well, that’s just the way recruitment works, particularly working with analytics, we’re already looking at the positions that we think we’ll need and that’ll be something that when Graeme comes in, there will be a real focus on.
January seems a long way away and here we are at the end of October, and as I said earlier, the number of fixtures we’ve got to play before then makes me think I can’t even think about that yet, but rest assured, others are working on this as we speak. We don’t just wait until January to see what might pop up, we are planning ahead. Next time we speak, which will be the end of January, we’ll see where we are with things. Exciting times ahead.
