
#049 - Ready, steady, goooo!
01/08/2026 -- It couldn’t any better so far. All circumstances are looking good for still being a Hearts manager within the next month. First I will show you our pre-season results and our schedule for the first few matches in the league. Again we played more practicing games than I’m used to, mainly because we are still bringing in new players, so they can take part in the team and learning our new 4-4-2 tactic as well. We faced a couple of tough opponents like Fulham and Derby County (both away) and Danish champion København but we managed to win seven out of eight and only conceding three goals.

The most important part every season are our efforts on the transfer market. We are still in a search for new players, but it’s really harsh to be honest. The market is quite small, with Rangers and Celtic picking nearly every promising talent. We can’t pay them, so we are dependent for left-overs and hiring somebody. Until now we signed only two new players. The first guy is one of these talents who is bought by Celtic in the past, but at the end he didn’t made it. Although he played around ten league matches every season. We are talking about Harry Cochrane. A very balanced central midfielder who is definitely an upgrade for us. Unfortunately not the natural leader we were searching for, but these kind of characters are nearly impossible to find. He is on a free which is important as well and I think his good passing, visions, technique and capability for making a goal are helping us for being more creative. He is almost paid twice as much as our second best paid player, but luckily we have a good amount of wage budget left so I think we had to do it.

The second newbie is a really promising youngster on loan from Liverpool called Neil Nix. I’m very glad with this guy who can compete with Field for sure. He is more a defender rather than an attacking wingback like Field, so we can make use from both of them qualities depending how the matches are evolving. There is one more player new in our squad. Last season we send Lloyd Kenny on loan to Championship side East Fife were he did a really good job. Celtic and Rangers were interested in him with Celtic making a really good offer at some point, but we warned them to put their hands of him! As you can see he is a very pacy winger, despite being only seventeen he has some great mental skills and his main technical attributes are double figures already, with dribbling already amazing. We made an £1,300,000 offer for a 22-year old Danish Guy, quite good as well, but at some point I was thinking: what am I actually doing? We have this youngster with us already, why are we spending such amount of money? Despite we agreed a contract with this Danish guy we turned it down in favour of Kenny. We give him all the space for developing himself, at least I have some really good faith in him. He might be our new club legend!


As already expected it’s quite hard to sell a couple of our players who I want to get rid of. This far only one player moved: Craig Halkett joined Saint Mirren. Yeah, that’s a real challenge, isn’t it Craig? Good for him, Good for us. Although we have to pay a little amount of his wage during his period at Saint Mirren, but we’ll take it (although I’m not really a fan of this). However, we received £500,000 for him, not that bad actually. Our search for new players is still going on, hopefully one of our scouts can bring in some interesting players as well.
This is it, the five most important matches of my managing career are starting to begin
Unfortunately our squad is far from complete so far, but the start of the season is definitely not wating for us of course. It will be challenging for sure. But there are two big favours ahead of us which do make it quite plausible that we can force a flying start of the season and not getting sacked. The first one is our schedule. I really have to send a big thanks to the Scottish Football Association. It seems like they wanted Luke Henderson in the Scottish Premiership for at least another year. We are facing Raith Rovers away (12th last season), Dundee at home (15th), Queen of the South at home again (they are promoted from the Championship), Partick Thistle away (13th) and Livingston away (16th). In that order. Normally spoken these matches should deliver us fifteen points. Normally spoken… But what should be normal currently at Hearts, I don’t know actually. Afterwards we are playing against Rangers, Hamilton, Hibernian and Celtic... Possible delivering us no points at all, but he, by the time my ass might be saved already, ha-ha! The second fact is that I always made a pretty good start throughout the seasons over the past few years. With Spartans of course and my first year with Hearts as well. The tactic looks good so far, I’m pleased with the new signings and we had a really solid run of practicing game. So probably everything went horribly wrong when the first official match is starting to begin ha-ha… Next update I will show you if I’m still in charge with Hearts!
Note: Thanks Scott, we really need it! I truly hope we can do so, I'm really not done yet with this club. We strenghtened our squad a bit TheLFCFan, but not as much as I was hoping for at this point. Hopefully we can add some more quality and squad depth in the next few weeks. As already said above, next update will make everything clear.