Hearts might not have beaten Celtic to the league title, but their management recruitment process beats the hell out of Dermot Desmond’s…

Okay, let me get this straight.

Hearts lose their manager to the Ibrox side on a Friday.

By the following Tuesday, the Daily Record is running a piece naming eight – yes, eight – candidates to replace him.

Eight names.

Formal interviews getting underway this week.

An appointment pencilled in for the players returning to pre-season next Thursday.

A supercomputer in the background crunching the numbers on every one of them.

No way, a club that actually operates in a professional manner?

In Scotland??

Did Hearts just run a more professional managerial search in four days than this Celtic board has managed in four years??

They did, didn’t they??

I had to read that one twice.

Three times, in fact.

The Jamestown machine versus the fax machine

Tony Bloom’s Jamestown Analytics has the Hearts board sitting there with a list.

Rene Hake. Felice Mazzu. Karel Geraerts. John McGlynn. Sebastien Pocognoli. Dave Challinor. Alexander Blessin. Neil McCann, and as discussed yesterday, possibly even Robbie Keane.

Managers working abroad, managers working in the UK, the net cast as wide as it’ll go.

A whole spread of profiles, scored, ranked, run through the same wizardry that built Union Saint-Gilloise out of lower league gems nobody else had heard of.

Succession planning so calm that the Record reckons they were primed the moment the Ibrox side first made contact.

Eight serious names, and a plan, and a deadline.

Meanwhile, at Celtic Park?

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…

Wait, was that a fax machine I just heard cranking up?

Alas no, it was the sound of Silent Mike’s “world class” coffee machine doing the hard yards while he waits on a phone call from Barbados that’s never coming.

Let me paint you the picture down our way.

Our recruitment process, as far as anyone can tell, was a three-man shortlist that lived and died in the imagination of a golfer in Barbados.

Robbie Keane, earmarked, then quietly walked back.

Martin O’Neill, re-upped for another year because the music stopped and somebody had to be sitting in the chair.

And a third name nobody can even agree on, because there was never a process to begin with.

Three names.

If we’re being generous.

Zilch. Zero. Nada in the way of a system.

A whiteboard, a deckchair, and the back of a fag packet, or a Cuban cigar box in the case of Desmond.

Here’s the part that should sting.

Bloom looked at a vacancy and reached for a supercomputer.

Desmond looks at a vacancy and reaches for the phone, or the phone on the fax machine, when he can be bothered to pick it up.

One club treats a manager hunt like the multi-million pound recruitment decision it is.

The other treats it like an inconvenience interrupting his round.

And Brian “Unity” Wilson just sits there in his “interim” capacity, neither helping nor leaving, which is about his level.

Hearts have eight candidates and a data model.

We had Alan McInally on the radio assuring us Martin would be getting a “big bag o’ cash”.

That’s our analytics department.

Cloud cuckoo land, and a cardboard cut out would run the numbers better than Silent Mike ever has.

Amateurs.

Make no mistake, this is the bit the Stenography Corps won’t dwell on.

Because if you line the two processes up side by side, ours looks archaic.

Not behind the times.

Archaic.

A club sitting on £80m in the bank, fifty-six titles to its name, the biggest institution in the country, and our “succession planning” has all the rigour of a fax machine that ran out of toner in 2003.

They might not have the title, but they have a plan

Now, let’s be honest here.

Hearts didn’t win the league.

They led from August until the 87th minute of the final day, and then they Heartsed it, and we’ll always have that.

Long may it stay that way.

But you cannot look at what they’re doing this week and tell me – hand on heart – that their recruitment process isn’t running rings around ours.

Can you??

Tony Bloom is a Premier League brain who treats a managerial appointment as a problem to be solved.

Desmond is a billionaire who treats it as a thing that happens to him, eventually, once the fans have stopped shouting and he’s decided he can be bothered.

The puppet master golfer in Barbados doesn’t do urgency.

He never has.

He never will.

And nobody around him has the testicular fortitude to tell him otherwise.

And while he’s mulling it over from a deckchair, a club a third of our size has eight names interviewed, scored, and ready to go before our lot have located the meeting room.

The bottom line

It tells us that the gap between Celtic and Hearts isn’t about money.

We have more of that than they’ll ever dream of.

It’s about competence and a board that plans, against a board that golfs and ehhhh, sleeps.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

It’s about a club that has built a system, against a club that keeps hoping it’ll sort itself out in the last week of the window.

It’s about giving a f**k.

And you know what the most galling part is??

Bloom didn’t even need to spend the money.

He just needed to do the basics properly.

Cast the net wide.

Run the numbers.

Draw up a list longer than three names scribbled on the back of a Barbados bar receipt.

Have a deadline, and actually mean it.

That’s it.

That’s the whole “masterplan”.

It isn’t rocket science, and it isn’t a supercomputer either, not really.

It’s just caring enough to do the job.

Something this board has never once managed in the entire reign of the absent golfing meddler.

I rest my case.

So no, Hearts didn’t beat us to the title.

But their management recruitment process beats the hell out of Dermot Desmond’s.

And if that doesn’t embarrass the people running our club, nothing ever will.

It won’t, though.

Because they are beyond embarrassment.

It was ever thus.

Get it f***ing sorted.

Sad, but true.

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