ABSOLUTE DISASTER SAYS GARY MACKAY
I’m gutted for the club. Hearts are my team and I’ll back the board but we have to be honest and admit they should never have been at bottom. In strictly football terms, the whole season was an...
ON yet another day of pain for Hearts, few will have felt the hurt quite like Gary Mackay.
A Tynecastle legend during his playing days and a died-in-the-wool supporter ever since, Mackay always suspected this bitter war between his club and the rest of the Scottish game was likely to end like this. Badly.
No league reconstruction. No lifeline back into next season’s top flight. No choice but for Ann Budge to jab a finger on the nuclear button of dragging the SPFL into court.
While the football world now waits to discover what kind of legal action she is about to propose following the death knell for a reshuffle of the divisions yesterday, Mackay was already bracing himself for the fall into the second tier.
And the most painful aspect of it all is the knowledge that Hearts have no one else to blame but themselves for ending up in such an awful mess in the first place.
Shortly after Budge announced yesterday that she’s called in the lawyers Mackay told Record Sport: “It’s the response I expected and I can understand why they’ve gone down this road. We have to remember there were eight games left to play. It was going to be a hard task but it wasn’t an impossible one.
“From that perspective I understand it and if taking legal action brings financial recompense then it will have done the job of helping to protect the club – because there will be a huge hit from dropping into the Championship.
“But we also have to be honest and admit it’s a situation we should never have got ourselves into. I’ve heard people saying we were unlucky with injuries. It was this, it was that. “But Hearts – with the squad of players they had at the start of the 2019/20 season – should not have been sitting four points adrift with eight games to go.
“For me, I have to try to separate both matters in my own head because I still believe it all comes down to the mismanagement of our own football department.
“The reason legal action is being taken is because we were sitting bottom of the league by a decent margin after a defeat from St Mirren in our last Premiership game.”
And now not only are Hearts facing up to a future in a 27-game Championship season but Mackay fears they might find themselves completely isolated, when football has finally come out of this coronavirus catastrophe.
He said: “It’s always dangerous to go out on your own in a sport like football and in a country the size of Scotland. You have to be prepared for how other clubs are likely to respond towards you.
“It doesn’t matter what walk of life you are in, if you are out on your own and then you end up not being vindicated then it could be another sore one.
“The difficulty here is that the decision to end the season was voted through by the clubs.
“It comes back to Hearts feeling that the whole situation has been unjust. Unfortunately, it all goes back to the debacle over the Dundee vote at the start of the whole process.
“I’m gutted for the club. It feels like Hearts have been a hamster in a wheel all this time. The whole situation has gone around and around and now Ann Budge feels the hamster has to have another couple of turns.
“If that’s the way they feel then I would back the club all the way. But the reaction from others will maybe not be as supportive.
“You can’t hide from the fact that, along with Partick and Stranraer, we were at the bottom of our particular league. And the reason we were at the bottom of our particular league was because our performances weren’t good enough.
“I would say the same to the players but they probably know it themselves. Look, there are far more serious things affecting the real world right now so you have to keep it all in context but in strictly footballing terms the season was an absolute disaster.”
And that’s what is hurting Mackay the most right now. The thought that next season might not be much better.
He said: “The difficulty we’ve had over the last couple of months is that nobody could see what was in front of us. And that remains the situation for Hearts today.
“Yes, other clubs might have some clarity but at Hearts we still don’t have that clarity because we don’t feel the decision was right.
“But it has dragged on and on and the sooner the whole process is sorted, the better because the Scottish game has become a laughing stock.
“It’s difficult for me because it’s my club – the club that I want the best for – that are now prolonging the process.
“If I was looking at some other club doing the very same thing would I feel as supportive? I’m not sure.
“But because it’s Hearts I’ll support whatever the board thinks is the best way forward.
“I’m more equipped to judge what’s gone on on the football side. And it’s not been anywhere near good enough.
“In terms of the legalities I’m not so well equipped. But if the club feel this is the right path then I’ll back them.
“My hope is that the club is also concentrating on the football department. The legal action is one thing and the club wants to be strong in that fight.
“But the other side of the equation is how do we take our club forward on the pitch? That’s where the talking will have to be done after the legal action has finished.”