Hearts fail to read the room with awards night own goal

The club stuck to that doggedly as players and officials arrived for their player of the year awards ceremony at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on Sunday night.

The timing could hardly have been worse. Having lost to Dundee the previous day, Hearts have found themselves dragged back into a scrap at the bottom of the Premiership. Decisive action was taken on Saturday evening, and Critchley was shown the door, the second Hearts boss to be sacked this season.

It hardly seemed like a time for celebration but the annual shindig went ahead regardless. What Ann Budge and co hadn’t banked on was a camera crew from Sky Sports News turning up at the venue to elicit their thoughts on the reasons behind Critchley’s abrupt departure.

The response could best be described as muted.

Liam Fox, placed in interim charge of the first team, was first to be quizzed. Asked if he was the man to “keep Hearts up”, Fox offered no response. Lawrence Shankland, the club captain, was equally unresponsive when it was put to him that the players had to bear some responsibility for Critchley’s sacking.

Budge, the Hearts chair, at least offered some words although it would perhaps have been better if she hadn’t. Asked how difficult it was to sack Critchley, her reply came across as rather callous. “Sorry, that was yesterday’s news,” she said, laughing.

Critchley’s tenure was largely a disappointment. He won more than he lost but was found consistently wanting on the big occasions. Having initially lifted Hearts clear of the danger zone, the club now find themselves only five points off the relegation play-off spot with four games remaining.

But regardless of Critchley’s shortcoming he deserved to be treated with more respect than afforded to him by Budge ahead of a glitzy ceremony where self-congratulation was on the menu despite a season of mediocrity.

Budge was clearly unprepared for the question but you would be entitled to expect the Hearts chief to be a little more nimble on her feet after more than a decade at the club’s helm. Shankland, too, could at least have offered conciliatory words and accepted that some of the blame lay with the players for the club’s present predicament.

Hearts’ failure to read the room is the latest sign of a growing disconnect between the club’s hierarchy and their supporters. Another managerial appointment has gone badly wrong and Budge and chief executive Andrew McKinlay are looking for their sixth boss in six years.

McKinlay had predicted at the club’s agm in December that Hearts would finish the season in the top six under Critchley and their partnership with Tony Bloom and his data analysis firm, Jamestown Analytics, would be a “game-changer” which would help turn the Tynecastle side into credible title challengers in the longer term.

The latter seems some way off given the current predicament but given the failure of the Critchley experiment the next managerial appointment now becomes an acid test for Jamestown's credibility.