Sheffield United boss makes ‘wrong man’ claim when quizzed on future after 8-0 defeat to Newcastle

Heckingbottom led Sheffield United to promotion to the Premier League but The Blades are currently bottom of the table and without a win in their opening six matches. And the club suffering its heaviest ever home league defeat on Sunday leaves Heckingbottom as the favourite to be the first Premier League manager to be sacked this season.

But when asked about his future Heckingbottom said: “This [question] might be a theme by the looks of it but I can’t answer any of that.

“The game I can, the players, my department, yeah no problem. But things like that you’re asking the wrong man.”

Goals from Sean Longstaff, Dan Burn and Sven Botman put Newcastle 3-0 up at half-time.

“The first half, the game in open play was what we expected,” Heckingbottom said at half-time. “We couldn’t capitalise on our moments and the frustrating thing is to go in 3-0 down from three restarts with a free-kick, a throw-in and a corner.

“The [collapse] is the biggest thing for me. Is this result going to define our season? No, it’s three points lost.

“We were outcompeted by Newcastle, we could see that. There was a moment in the second half where we break with Bénie Traoré and Newcastle got back and swarmed us with a real hunger about them and that’s what we are, but we weren’t in the second half.”

Second half goals from Callum Wilson, Anthony Gordon, Miguel Almiron, Bruno Guimaraes and Alexander Isak wrapped up a record-breaking away win for Newcastle.

“We understand the league we are in, we’ve lost three points regardless but as long as we learn from the nature of the defeat and what went wrong then all we have lost is three points,” the Sheffield United boss added.

“You could see moments where Newcastle out-fought us and out-ran us. That is not acceptable. We want to compete.

“There is still a level of competition we expect. We know they have top class players but there is an expectation from us that we are here to compete.

“The organisation is on me, but it is not like we don’t work on it.”