'I'm not even using that word' - CEO McKinlay 'confident' Hearts will avoid relegation battle
The Chief Executive Officer was asked how concerned he was about the first team’s current league position.
Hearts’ CEO Andrew McKinlay believes that the first team will be well clear of a relegation scrap come the end of the 2024/25 Scottish Premiership season.
The Jambos are currently bottom of the league table and have picked up just one point from their previous three league matches. However, those games have come against Celtic and Rangers as well as high flying Aberdeen and their upcoming run of fixtures includes home matches against Dundee and St Johnstone as well as a trip to fellow strugglers Kilmarnock.
Although results have been slow to pick up since the arrival of head coach Neil Critchley, the performance level has been much more pleasing and the remainder of December will give them a good opportunity to climb off the bottom and hopefully away from danger. McKinlay was speaking after Wednesday’s AGM at Tynecastle and was defiant when asked about the possibility of a relegation battle.
He said: “I'm not even using that word. I'm confident we will finish in the top six. I look at the league table, it's very tight. I think Aberdeen's position, and I take my hat off to them for what they've achieved, they've had a magnificent start to the season.
“I think it's been interesting that now they've had to play some midweek games that it's maybe been a bit harder for them, but they haven't had Europe, but take your hat, they've been brilliant. There's some other teams that have done very well, Dundee United and Motherwell in particular, but I think with the fixtures we've got coming up that we've got an opportunity to start climbing the table and first get ourselves back into the top six, and then we'll see what's before us at that point.”
McKinlay did admit that it was ‘concerning’ that the club were still bottom of the Premiership as we approach two months of Critchley’s tenure. However, he is confident that the former Liverpool coach will start moving them up the table.
He said: “Of course it is concerning, I think the way the fixtures have fallen hasn't maybe been the kindest, we went straight into a really intense run of fixtures and I think the style of football that Neil is bringing to the team, and this is just my personal view, I don't have the stats to back this up or the science to back this up, but those first two games were really high intense, really big full on and then we went to Easter Road and we dug out a draw in the end and you could see that it was starting to impact on the players. I thought that is probably why we lost against Kilmarnock the mid-week after that.
“We then dug out a good win at St Johnstone and I thought that was really important because I knew the fixtures that were coming up. Personally I thought we were unlucky. When I say unlucky it goes back to one thing, we need to take our chances, we all know that.
“So against Heidenheim, against Rangers, I thought both of those games we could easily have come away with draws or wins and then Celtic are Celtic but again, first half against Celtic. if we had taken some chances we could have really got on top of them but it would have been interesting to see how they would have reacted to that.
“Belgium, same story, but we can't have sob stories, we are still bottom and we need to kick on. I thought Sunday was good in the sense that you go one down against Aberdeen, you've been in Europe, I thought in the second half towards the end you could have made an argument that we were the team that looked like we had more left in the tank and we kept going and in the end maybe could have stolen it but we now go into seven fixtures, four at home, three away which takes us up to the end of the second round of fixtures and we need to do well in those fixtures. but I think we know that.”