Hearts supremo Ann Budge has confirmed that Austin MacPhee is a candidate to become the club's next permanent manager.
Budge also assured fans that Craig Levein will not be involved in picking his successor.
The manager was fired last week and stood down as director of football, but he remains on the Hearts board until the end of the season.
The likes of Roy Keane and David Moyes have been linked but insists she isn't in the business of speculation .
She said: "They're being linked by you guys, they're not being linked by me!
"I don't see why not, to be honest, look at some of the other managers we have in Scotland at the moment.
"A few years ago we would have been questioning whether that was possible and Hearts is no different.
"We have to compete with the top clubs in Scotland and to do that I want to ensure that we get a very experience and high-profile manager.
"Austin MacPhee is definitely a contender, he's the interim manager at the minute, he's done so before and he's done very well when he did it before.
"Austin's got a lot of experience.
"Experience of managing the first team? No, but he's still got a lot of experience.
"I'm not ruling Austin out, he knows what he's got to do to strengthen his case and he'll be working hard to do that."
That led fans to fear that he'd have a role in picking the next manager, having been in charge of football operations, but Budge insisted that will not be the case.
She said: "I've no interest in appointing or replacing a director of football.
"We'll appoint a different structure which is appropriate for today. We want to get a new manager in place as quickly as possible, but I'll take as long as it takes to find the right person.
"I'm in no hurry, it's not that we have someone in our sights. I want to go through the process rigorously and thoroughly and explore a lot of avenues so the net will be cast quite wide.
"One thing I'm convinced of is that running the whole football operation is too big for one person for a club of this size and the size we want to be, so it's important that we have a manager who has the time to focus on the first team and really not worry about the other things.
"Obviously we have our own nominations group, a subset of the board, but we'll be taking advice from football experts, whether that's a formal appointment of a consultant or whether it's leveraging contacts we now have.
"One thing I will make clear is that Craig is not part of that process, it won't be Craig who is providing the football expertise.
"But I've had a number of offers to help and we're also looking at consultancy.
"The sporting director, to me, is a crucial appointment. And before anyone asks, we won't be appointing Craig as sporting director.
"But any manager who comes in has to come in knowing that there will be a sporting director."
