Worst I’ve ever seen

He’s been asked to cope with catastrophes at Clydebank and Clyde and misery at Motherwell.

But the administrator has admitted NOTHING compares to the horrors he has uncovered at Hearts.

He reckons he’ll need every bit of his experience of saving football clubs up and down the country in order to rescue the Jambos.

Jackson and fellow administrator Trevor Birch arrived at Tynecastle with their team yesterday morning.

Within a matter of hours, 14 admin staff — nine full-time and five part-time — were made redundant, some understandably in tears as they said their goodbyes.

Four players are expected to follow this morning after the pair held summit talks with Gary Locke.

The Jambos boss, like everyone else to have stayed on at the club, is working for nothing — and the staff have been given no indication when they might be paid.

But Jackson insisted the brutal cuts had to be made in a hurry because the situation at Hearts is as bad as anything he’s had to cope with.

He said: “To be honest, this is as desperate as anything I have seen.

“To arrive in June, when you have no income anyway, and have a situation where 7,000 season tickets have already been sold, it doesn’t get much worse.

“The situation here has been made even more bleak because people haven’t been paid for a month. We also can’t promise when people will be paid.

“We had a staff meeting today. We were quite upfront that we have no cash and that we don’t know when we will be in a position to advance any funds going forward.

“Hopefully everybody will remain and support that. But that’s another ongoing problem — asking people to stay when you can’t even give them a date when you will pay them.

“With regard to the ones who have left, the way it is chosen is not to do with the person but the actual job they are doing.

“I don’t want to talk about individuals, but if you’re in a position where you can’t sign players then it’s unlikely you will require a scout, in the short-term anyway.

“That’s basically how these things come about. You can’t afford to keep people on the payroll in that situation.

“In terms of support, we support the staff on a one-to-one basis and they also link in with the government, who try to support them.

“But trying to look at the positive side of it, we all know there is a huge fanbase here and that is what we have to tap into now. There is nowhere else to go.

“I’m a boring conservative accountant and I can’t give false promises.

“But we wouldn’t have taken on this job unless we believed it was saveable. Of course it is.”

Jackson has pleaded with Hearts fans to buy 3,000 more season tickets in the next fortnight. He estimates that will give the club enough money to make it through to the start of next season.

It will also mean he won’t have to sell off the club’s best assets to keep it alive.

Jackson expects Locke to have a playing squad of 22 after today’s departures.

He knows that isn’t a lot for the Jambos manager to work with. But he believes if they can hang on to promising youngsters Jamie Walker, Jason Holt and Kevin McHattie, they can be competitive next season.

Jackson said: “When I say that we are trying to keep the squad intact, if another club came along and made a ridiculously high offer for one of the players, we might not be able to resist it.

“That’s unlikely. But we can’t put ourselves in a situation where we have to accept an offer we would view as derisory.

“But if people don’t buy season tickets, we will run out of options.

“We’re trying to remain competitive with the people we have left.

“The squad we have left will be very young, but we are trying to go slightly above total survival here and try to do better than that.

“I think we have around 26 players and there are potentially four going, so that leaves a fairly tight pool.

“Despite that, there is still a lot of potential there.

“If you were starting from scratch and hadn’t actually sold any season tickets at this stage, then it appears to us this is a viable club.”

Normally, when a club goes into administration, the money men are the first to get paid.

But Jackson revealed BDO will NOT charge Hearts a fee for their work until the club is sold on.

He hopes that will persuade fans to buy season tickets because the money will go directly towards running the club.

He added: “We have said we will not be taking a fee until we know what is happening with the sale of the actual property.

“So I can give the supporters an assurance that if they buy season tickets, none of those funds will go towards our fee. It all goes towards the running of the club.

“When you look at the amount of money the fans have put in which is already gone, they need to know the money they give us will be used for the right reasons.

“It will be used to pay the wages of the players and the staff and the running costs of the club. It will not be used for anything else.”