The next Sir Alex Ferguson? Derek McInnes' Hearts bear his mentor's fingerprints

"You better not lose today!"

Sir Alex Ferguson kept the advice simple, revealed Derek McInnes as he recalled a pre-match telephone conversation with his mentor while driving to the vital Edinburgh derby between bitter rivals Hibernian and his Scottish Premiership leaders, Hearts.

The pair are in regular contact, usually on a match day when Derek is driving from his home in Glasgow to meet up with his squad.

"Every conversation I have with him, I feel privileged," McInnes told reporters in February. "I always get something from it" ...Except maybe that one on the M8 to Easter Road: "I kind of knew it anyway," the Hearts manager joked.

Each word shared between the pair carries the weight of history. Ferguson is the only man alive who has walked the path McInnes is now trying to navigate.

Since 1985, when Sir Alex Ferguson -- just plain Alec Ferguson back then -- guided Aberdeen to the title, an ironclad duopoly has dominated Scottish football. The 40 seasons that have passed since (22 titles for Celtic, 18 for Rangers) have only served to add a sense of impossibility to the feats achieved by Ferguson's Dons.

But that could be about to change.

The finish line is in sight for McInnes and his table-topping Hearts team who are bidding to win the club's first top-flight championship since 1960. Hearts are three points clear of Celtic and seven from Rangers. There are just three league games remaining.

For a table-topping coach looking for a wee helping hand to get over the line, asking a man who won more trophies than any football manager in history is definitely not the worst idea in the world.

"He knows my players, he's well aware of who's who, and some of them can't get their heads around that when I tell them!" said McInnes about a man who was still learning his trade as a player at Queen's Park when Hearts last tasted glory 66 years ago.

"I mentioned Cammy Devlin to Sir Alex the other day and he said we missed him when he was out injured. So I told that to Cammy. The wee man said, 'he never said that.' I told him he did, and then I said, 'he says you need to pass forward more, you need to switch the play more and you need to shoot more.' He actually didn't say that, but now Cammy thinks he did!"

- Hearts, Celtic, Rangers? Who's going to win the Scottish Premiership this season?

Despite their achievements being separated by close to half a century, there are more similarities between Ferguson and McInnes than you might think: both from Glasgow, both played for Rangers, both tasked with toppling the Glasgow giants with non-Glasgow teams. If he can do with Hearts what Ferguson did with Aberdeen, McInnes' name will forever be mentioned in the same breath as a man who for so long seemed one of one.

Mind games and Ferguson were bedfellows, intrinsically linked when the now-84 year-old was swatting aside all comers with Aberdeen and Manchester United, so if that was good enough for Sir Alex back then it sure is good enough for McInnes now. Just ask Cammy Devlin.

Napier University or a pro career? McInnes' sliding doors moment

As is usually the case in British football, the ultimate prize is preceded by the sharing out of individual awards. The night before Hearts' win over Rangers last weekend that effectively knocked McInnes' former team out of the the title race, the 54-year-old stopped off at the PFA Scotland awards on his way home from Hearts' own awards evening which was wound down early in order to get the players safely tucked up in bed.

Living just a few miles away from the city centre hotel where attendees had been mingling jovially since six o'clock, McInnes' attended knowing he was a shoo-in for a manager's award which he accepted with trademark humour:

Q: "What plans do you have for next season if you win the league?"

A: "If we win the league there's absolutely no f---ing plans for next season -- you'll no see me for a while!"

As all of us likely do in the wake of moments of personal triumph, McInnes' mind was pulled back to the beginning, when Scottish Premiership titles, manager of the year awards and Sir Alex Ferguson comparisons would have seemed peaks too high to possibly scale.

The sight of a group of students on work experience with the PFA brought it all back. After learning that they were part of the Sports Journalism course at Edinburgh's Napier University, McInnes grinned and shared with them: "I nearly went there to study that exact same course in 1988, but Greenock Morton offered me a playing contract that summer and I chose to play football instead."

McInnes soon returned to the stage to accept Claudio Braga's player of the year award. Braga, a €500,000 summer arrival identified by new Hearts investor Tony Bloom's industry-leading data firm, of course, could not be there because he was tucked up in bed...

"Aye, but I'm not convinced he's asleep," McInnes joked. "He'll be wanting a phone call the minute I get off this stage to tell him if he's won or not!"

'They're running out of things to say about us'

After McInnes and Braga woke the next morning and took another step towards the title, the biggest prize of all has moved within touching distance.

"We don't want to get slapped on the back at the end of the season and told, 'well done for putting up a good fight' -- it's beyond that now and for us we now have to go and win the thing now and hopefully we can be good enough over the last few games," McInnes told me on the 401st episode of Scarves Around the Funnel.

Such is the dominance of the Old Firm in Scotland, one of McInnes' biggest challenges was turning doubters into believers. Getting the Hearts faithful on side didn't take long, but persuading outsiders proved a greater task.

"There were enough people who, despite our good start, were still saying 'yeah but they haven't won in Glasgow yet.' Now they're running out of things to say about us and we've got the chance to see it through," McInnes said.

"We've now beaten every team we've played. Motherwell have had three attempts and not beaten us. Rangers might have beaten us once at Ibrox but we won at Tynecastle. It's worth mentioning all that to the players to give them that extra wee bit of confidence going into these last few games. I can guarantee you we're not going to be any more motivated than we've been all season."

If McInnes and his players are able to get the job done and win Hearts' first top flight title since 1960, then the celebrations will eclipse even those of 1998. That was when the Jambos brought the Scottish Cup back to Gorgie for the first time since 1956, and more than a quarter of a million people took to the streets of Edinburgh to celebrate.

That scenario would also put McInnes firmly on the radar of some of the bigger teams in England. The same thing happened to the last manager who knocked Celtic and Rangers off their perch, and he went on to do alright for himself south of the border...

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