Robbie Neilson admits that contract talks with Andy Irving are still ongoing but won’t put a timeline on the midfielder’s decision.
Hearts are desperate to keep the 21-year-old in maroon and have been negotiating over a new contract offer for the last few weeks.
There has been plenty of back and forth between club and player but a consensus is yet to be reached, with fans concerned that they could lose one of their top young talents for nothing in the summer.
Neilson is relaxed however, and won’t rush the player for a decision.
He said: “We’re still chatting and we’ll see how it goes in the coming days and weeks.
“Andy is a big Hearts fan, his family are Hearts fans and we have said all along we’d like to keep him.
“He has played very well for us, I still think he has a long way to go to become the player we think he can become and we think this is the best place for him to do it.”
Hearts are back in Championship action against Greenock Morton at Tynecastle tomorrow, and Neilson is glad of a reprieve from a run of Friday night fixtures.
But he wants to see a better performance from is charges than he got against Queen of the South last week.
He said: “It’s been a while, it’s the only Saturday game we have this month. We go up to Inverness a week today so it’s good to get back on the grass and back to Tynecastle.
“I hope we can put on a better performance, we dominated a lot of possession but we were slow and took an extra two, three touches and were not aggressive enough in possession.
“It’s something we spoke about after the game and in the analysis on Monday morning and we’ve worked on this week. Yes we have to dominate possession in these games but we have to be more aggressive with it.
“When you play in this league, I’ve seen it with Hearts previously and Dundee United, you are expected to win every game and win three, four, five-nil, and it doesn’t work like that.
“There’s difficult teams, stuffy teams, especially at away venues. The majority of them set up to take a point out of the game and it’s up to us to break them down.
"It’s tough at times, we should have the quality to get three points but if we don’t we have to make sure we pick up a point.”
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