John McGlynn, the Hearts manager, will return to the Tynecastle dug-out for the first time since being named as permanent manager when St Johnstone travel to Edinburgh for their opening league match of the season tomorrow.
The club's former youth coach, assistant manager and caretaker manager rejoined the club from Raith Rovers during the summer. He spent over five years with the Fife club and has returned with a laudable reputation.
He has been afforded time to settle into the role as each of Hearts' pre-season matches took place away from home. However, that has not led McGlynn to become too comfortable.
"I know I'm getting one chance of this and I'm going to try and make the most of it," he said. "Caretaker is one thing, being an assistant is one thing and being the manager is another thing – the responsibility lies on your shoulders and that is it."
There are only likely to be six survivors from the team that started May's 5-1 thrashing of Hibernian in the Scottish Cup final tomorrow. McGlynn has instead been tasked with blooding youngsters amid austere times at Tynecastle. However, the Hearts manager has acknowledged that those cutbacks will not lessen the expectation to deliver success, especially with Rangers no longer in the top flight.
"I'm very happy with the squad we've got, but it would be nice to get a striker in," said McGlynn, who admitted that fans' favourite Rudi Skacel is currently out of his price range. "However, I came here to work with young players and if it means bringing more of them into it, I'm prepared to do that."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article