Ann Budge has hit back at Peterhead boss Jim McInally - telling him not to make the argument over league reconstruction personal.
On Thursday, the Blue Toon manager had accused Budge and Hearts of trying to bully clubs in League One and Two in order to ensure her proposal gets the required support and save the Jambos from relegation.
But Budge has urged McInally and fellow detractors to get real and start behaving like they’re involved in a serious business rather than trash talking and bringing the game down.
“Yesterday morning’s headlines irritated me,” said Budge. “Apparently I am single handedly going to keep Scottish football in lockdown. It’s just nonsense.
“But I do also get very frustrated when people make it personal. This isn’t about Ann Budge. I’m fed up reading about Ann Budge this and Ann Budge that to be frank. It’s about the problems we’ve got in football.
“I have absolutely no problem with Jim McInally phoning up and saying ‘this is rubbish, you don’t understand my point of view.’
“I’ve already spoken to several people in League One and League Two. Have I managed to change their minds? Have I managed to convince them I’m not a bully? We have to talk.
“The headlines and statements are nonsense and don’t help anyone. It certainly doesn’t help the game when we’re in this ridiculous situation, this emergency situation. We should be pulling together, not making such extreme remarks. I think ‘self-seeking’ was one of the other ones I read.
“Someone said to me the other day that Scottish football is a huge part of the Scottish economy and we should be demanding this and that from the Government.
“Then you go from that to ‘we’re going make her pay because we don’t like something in a paper’. Either we are a serious business contributing to the Scottish economy or we’re the opposite. These sorts of comments unfortunately pull the whole game down.
“That’s in my opinion, but people are allowed to have their own, although I’ve never been accused of being a bully before. I’ve been accused of lots of things, but bullying’s never been one of them!”
Budge also confirmed that she wouldn’t be offering contract extensions to any of the club’s senior players, although some could return at a later date.
These include the likes of Oliver Bozanic, Donis Avdijaj, Marcel Langer and Steven MacLean.
Some of the club’s youngsters, such as Jamie Brandon and Lewis Moore, will be offered new deals to ensure Hearts don’t miss out on any potential training compensation.
But the majority of recruitment will have to wait with departures set to be announced next week.
“We had a very small number of players out of contract at the end of May and it just isn’t possible or make any kind of sense to extend anybody’s contract,” she explained.
“We’ve had very amicable conversations with the individuals involved and it may well be that some of them end up back here again.
“But I can’t be asking people to take wage cuts then effectively taking on new players. So we won’t be extending any of the senior players’ contracts.
“Some of the younger ones, we have to do the usual things like protecting training compensation so all of that is being handled as well and some do have extensions. We want to keep them.
“We won’t be making any new signings for reasons which are probably quite obvious. A number of people have said they want to join Hearts but I can’t even enter into these discussions at the moment given all the uncertainty.
“We don’t even know when the transfer window is going to open. From memory, I think it’s meant to be June 10. Will it open then? None of us know and until that happens there’s a limit to what you can do.”
