It is fair to say Hearts’ season is not going according to plan.
After finishing way ahead in third and getting to two semi-finals under Steven Naismith last season, that would have been the minimum aim for this campaign too, with fans dreaming of a potential top two push.
Instead it’s Aberdeen who look like they could actually split the Old Firm while the Jambos languish at the bottom of the Premiership.
New manager Neil Critchley started well with a win and a draw on league business as well as a brilliant Euro win over Omonia Nicosia. But he was back down to earth with a bump last night with Kilmarnock winning in Gorgie.
That sent them back to the foot of the table and has fans fearing a relegation battle.
Hearts still aiming high in Premiership
The aim for Hearts at the beginning of each season is to finish third, which they’ve done twice in the previous three years.
This year though that is looking more and more unlikely with Aberdeen now 22 points ahead of them after their unbeaten start.
CEO Andrew McKinlay insists though that the Jambos are not giving up the ghost on their initial aims just yet.
Speaking yesterday ahead of the Dons moving three points further ahead, he told Hearts TV: “We’ve not changed our goals, other than one which was to get to the League Cup semi-finals. We’ve obviously failed on that one.
“We still have it that we want to get to a Scottish Cup semi-final at the very least. Obviously we want to do better than that but that’s how we budget.
“For the league, and people might think this is ridiculous but we’re early still. I’m not changing our ambition to be third.
“But I’m not daft, that’s not going to be easy. Because we can do so much, we can improve a lot and get a lot more points. But good luck to Aberdeen having started the season phenomenally. It would be churlish of me to say anything else.
“But I’m not giving that up. I think the first thing we need to do it in bitesize chunks. We’re not that far away from the top six, other than Aberdeen it is fairly compact.”
McKinlay on Hearts transfer plans
McKinlay was giving his quarterly update to Hearts fans and also addressed the upcoming January transfer window and also the summer one.
Hearts will have use of Tony Bloom’s data analytics and the CEO admits there is one target they’re aggressively pursuing for January.
He added: “We’re hoping to do some business in January. What I would say is we have a big squad. I’m not saying people have to go for others to come in but it puts demands on the manager to manage such a big squad.
“Neil is certainly of the view that he wants a smaller squad. We might not manage that in January, January is a difficult time.
“But we’ve already identified one person we’re looking very closely at. Will we get them? Who knows but we will look to strengthen. We’re already looking at the summer, in particular with analytics looking at positions we think we’ll need.”