Andrew McKinlay: Hearts CEO on Derek McInnes, Neil Critchley, Lawrence Shankland, Tony Bloom, title hopes and more

Hearts CEO Andrew McKinlay admits he had relegation fears before sacking Neil Critchley, but is now “incredibly excited” about the future after appointing Derek McInnes as head coach.

In an exclusive interview with Sky Sports News, McKinlay also discussed Lawrence Shankland’s future and revealed a new contract has been offered to the striker.

With Brighton owner Tony Bloom also in talks over a proposed £9.86m investment into the club, who are using his analytics firm, McKinlay believes winning the Scottish Premiership title is a goal the Tynecastle Park side should believe is achievable in the future.

Click above to hear his interview in full via our Essential Football Podcast, with the best bits of his interview below in our Q&A with the Hearts chief…

Why was Derek McInnes the right person for this club?

“In the here and now, where we are, where the club sits, everything that Derek brings, I think is exactly what we need at this time.

“We need someone that understands the Scottish game, someone that’s managed at the top end of Scottish football, understands the demands of the Hearts support and has had success in the past.

“Derek is the man and I’m really looking forward to working with him.”

How many candidates did you speak to?

“We spoke to a good number of Scottish ones, but also a good number of foreign candidates as well. But this time our preference was in the main towards the Scottish side of things, but we didn’t want to just go down that route.

“We wanted just to check if there was anyone on the foreign side that maybe would surprise us, but it was fairly evident quickly that Scottish was the way to go.

“And then it was evident very, very quickly that Derek was the outstanding one of those candidates.”

What autonomy does he have? What is his remit?

“His remit is very much what most head coaches would be, he picks the team, he’s the one that gets the right team out there on a Saturday. He’s the head coach.

“You can ask about the recruitment side, we have a process which involves an analytics company, but he’s heavily involved in that, along with the sporting director. They work hand in hand around identifying the style of play that we want. So that would very much be Derek’s choice. He’ll then look at particular positions that we want and identify the type of player in those positions that we want.

“It’s then the job of the sort of analytics to look at, based on that, some options. That’s only very much part of the process.

“What then has to happen is that Derek has to be heavily involved along with Graeme [Jones, sporting director] and others in the character of the individuals.

“What the analytics can’t do is it can’t give you a view on how well they’ll culturally fit into the team, how well they’ll culturally fit into what’s demanded of a Hearts player, how well they’ll fit into living in Edinburgh, what’s their family dynamic like.

“A lot of work goes into signing a player and not just how good they are as a footballer and Derek will be massively involved in all of that process. He’s the main man when it comes to the men’s first team and what we’ll see out there on the pitch.”

Why is McInnes the right person now, but he wasn’t back in October?

“In October we were looking at different parameters to what we may be looking at this time around, and ultimately, we got it wrong.

“I’ll admit that we got it wrong. If anyone can stand there and say they’ve not made mistakes, then I challenge them on that.

“The main thing is you learn from those mistakes. We went for a certain type of manager and Neil [Critchley] was a very good coach, very nice guy, but I’m not sure he quite got the club and got the demands of the club.

“So we decided this time round, let’s keep it simple. That’s why, we’re going to go Scottish. That was one of the big reasons behind that.

“The whole piece around getting a manager that would understand this and would know what they were coming into, no surprises. So that’s the reason why, this time round, we took a different approach.”

Was there anything the club could have done to support Critchley? Could he have been given more time?

“I think he was very unlucky, in some ways I felt sorry for him, in that every fine margin everything went the wrong way for us.

“We could easily be sitting here looking forward to a Scottish Cup final this weekend, looking forward to Europe again, we should have qualified for the top six, but we didn’t.

“We had two games where we would have got top six, one of them against Dundee United, which if we’d won that we’d have then been hot on their heels for Europe.

“In the cup semi-final, we all know what happened there, so we could easily be sitting here in a very, very different place, and those are very, very fine margins.

“In some ways you’ve got to feel sorry for Neil, he’s a really nice guy, a really good coach, we just got to the stage where we felt we were concerned, after that Dundee game, that we were going to slip into a relegation situation.

“It’s important at this point actually, just to put on record how thankful I am to Liam Fox for stepping in, for winning four games in a row at a time when we really needed it.

“We’ve ended up finishing seventh, which is as good as we could do once we’re in the bottom six, but after that Dundee game, we were staring at least at a play-off, and everyone saw what happened to Hibs a few years ago when they were just in the bottom six, and that was acutely in my mind.

“Thinking about what had happened to Hibs, and then them getting relegated. I understand some people might think we were hasty, but I think hindsight shows it looks like it was probably the right decision.”

192 days in charge for Critchley, some would say that’s the club not backing its own decision to appoint him?

“I’m happy to say that in hindsight, I think he just wasn’t the right person at the right time. I’m not trying to criticise Neil, Neil would be a great coach somewhere, I genuinely think that.

“We’ve had a reputation in the past for being patient with coaches, I suspect at the moment, people are now criticising us for being too hasty.

“I believe Derek will be given the time to succeed. We want stability at the club, and we want Derek to be here for the next few years.

“I’d like to have a situation actually where I have a time when a manager goes when they want to go, when they decide to go. That would be nice because it’s no fun having to have these conversations.”

What do you say to the fans going forward?

“This is the dawn of a new era for us. Graeme, the new sporting director, he’s only in for six months and he’s built up a great relationship with the analytics guys, and they are unbelievably excited about what they think they can do here.

“Union (Saint-Gilloise), who’s the one everyone points to, are on the verge of winning the Belgian League and they’re doing that with a fraction of the budget of Club Brugges.

“That’s what we aspire to, over time. The Tony Bloom piece to have, and we’re not far away as everyone knows from that we’re going through a process at the moment, voting’s open at the moment for the foundation.

“We’re very hopeful that we’ll get that across the line. We’re really looking forward to it. He’ll have a board place, it won’t be him personally, but someone else will be on the board.

“We have access to someone like Tony Bloom and what he’s done at the other clubs, or his people have done at other clubs, and I just think there’s a number of things coming together at the one time that make me incredibly excited about what the future holds.

“It has been a hugely disappointing season, so we finished it strongly and I hope people now go into the summer, as opposed to with a bit of down thinking, they feel upbeat as to what the future actually looks like, and certainly I can’t wait for the start of next season.”

What is the target for Hearts?

“It has to be step by step, you can’t make rash promises when you’ve just finished a season in the bottom six, so the first thing is to re-establish ourselves where we think we should be on a regular basis, making sure we’re getting European football pretty much every year.

“If you look at Derek’s record at Aberdeen, he did it consistently and we expect him to do it consistently here.

“I hope that we can then look above us, and we hope that with the use of the systems that we’re now able to work with, and the people we now have at the club, including Derek, including Graeme, that we’ll be able to get a better quality player.

“That will improve our player trading, which everyone talks about, but we’ve not been as good at that as we would like to have been, but we think that that will improve that.

“Who knows whether that can then take us to challenge the teams above us. If you look at the example of Union, then I think that should give everyone the excitement that we could potentially do the same in Scotland that Union have done in Belgium.”

Do you think there’ll be more harmony at the club now?

“I hope we all get together. It’s never nice in a family when you’re fighting within the family, when we should be fighting against everyone else.

“We should be an absolute fortress here, and I mean that in the stadium, but as a club we all need to be pulling in the one direction, and we need to be pulling in such a way that let’s not point fingers at each other here, let’s make sure that we’re using all our energies to fight against the opposition and not ourselves.

“People are entitled to their views on Ann [Budge], on me, on anyone else. These are guys that pay their money every week, and they’re incredibly passionate, they’re incredibly supportive of this club, they also own this club, so they’re more than entitled.

“I just have to keep going, do the best I can do and hopefully they’ll see that I am doing that. I think at the end of the day, if we can bring success on the pitch, I suspect they’ll think I’m doing a good job.”

Is there a chance to keep Lawrence Shankland and Elton Kabangu?

“Elton, hopefully, we’ll have some news on that soon and I think that’ll be news that’ll be welcomed by the fans. We just need to sort out a couple of things, but that should be fairly straightforward.

“It’s been a bit of a soap opera as we know for the last two years with Lawrence. Not with him personally, but just constantly asked about him.

“We’re on record as having said that we’ve made an offer, Derek would like him to stay here. Derek’s spoken to him, Derek knows him. Derek had him up at Aberdeen, which probably wasn’t the best part of his career, but Derek understands maybe what didn’t work there and what does work and doesn’t work for Lawrence.

“I’m sure he’ll want to speak with his family and want to decide what’s best for him and his career.

“We hope that it’s back here and we genuinely think that if he did stay here for another three years, which is what we’ve offered, that he would become a genuine Hearts legend and would go back to how he was in the first two seasons and goals.

“I can already picture Derek’s teams with a couple of pacey wingers, getting the ball in for Lawrence and Lawrence banging it into the net. This place would absolutely love that.