Derek McInnes understands why there has been speculation around him and the Rangers job given Heart of Midlothian’s strong start to the season but says his full focus is on maintaining the Tynecastle club’s position at the top of the table.<\/p>\n
The 54-year-old former Rangers midfielder has been linked with the managerial vacancy at Ibrox but said he is only interested in matters relating to Hearts. <\/p>\n
McInnes took over at Tynecastle in May and has guided the Edinburgh club to a two-point lead at the top of the Scottish Premiership table, with 19 points from seven games.<\/p>\n
Rangers, meanwhile, languish in eighth, with eight points from their seven matches – and are already looking for a new head coach after Russell Martin’s exit.<\/p>\n
“I think any time a manager’s team is doing well, and the team is doing well, there’s always sometimes people talking you up and maybe some speculation from that,” McInnes said.<\/p>\n
“The flip side of that as a manager is you’re normally batting off questions about your job when things aren’t going well.<\/p>\n
“We’re just concentrating on trying to maintain our strong start – and it is just a start. But we’re really enjoying what we’re doing and really enjoying what we’re getting from the players.<\/p>\n
“We’re only talking about Hearts, trying to stay top of the league, taking the good from the last-minute derby winner, and now concentrating on the next challenge.<\/p>\n
“A lot of people are asking about the Celtic game in a couple of weeks’ time, and I get the reasons for that, but our game on Saturday needs our full attention.”<\/p>\n
McInnes added that it is not difficult to keep any speculation about his future in the background and his thoughts are purely on the visit to his former club at the weekend.<\/p>\n
He was in charge at Kilmarnock from 2022 and guided the Ayrshire side into Europe by finishing fourth in 2023-24.<\/p>\n
“There’s no conversations here other than we’re talking about trying to maintain a strong start. There’s a lot of positives at the club at the minute,” the former Aberdeen manager added.<\/p>\n
“We’re quite aware of how quickly that can change, and when you work for a club the size of Hearts, if you get a bad result, so we’re just trying to make sure we keep those bad afternoons to a minimum.<\/p>\n
“We concentrate on Saturday and Kilmarnock away is always a tough game for any team. Having managed there, I know how difficult it can be for an opposing team – and the fact is they’ve started well.<\/p>\n
“They’ve got good players. Stuart Kettlewell has started well in his tenure and I know there’s obviously going to be a lot of chat about me going back and stuff like that, but the game itself is needing our full attention.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Derek McInnes understands why there has been speculation around him and the Rangers job given Heart of Midlothian’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-215183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}