Csaba Laszlo warned his Hearts bosses you'll never win anything with kids as he revealed the depth of his frustration at watching the club go backwards this season.

Paraphrasing the quote which famously came back to haunt television pundit Alan Hansen more than a decade ago, an animated Laszlo insisted a refusal to bolster the squad with experienced players in the January transfer window would almost certainly result in failure.

The Hearts boss stopped short of repeating August's threat to walk away if he did not get the financial backing he was seeking.

But he made it clear he was not happy to preside over a club which had no ambition of bettering last season's third-placed finish in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League.

"If you would like to be better, you must have a clear structure," said Laszlo, who side have slumped to ninth spot this season and travel to Celtic in the quarter-finals of the Co-operative Insurance Cup on Wednesday night.

"If you don't have a clear structure, the loser is always the manager.

"I would like to have development. After third place, I am not satisfied.

"If you would like to be better, you also need quality.

"A very good guy said, 'With youth players, you never win anything'.

"This club must win something and the people are satisfied if they see the team can move forward. You must have progress.

"Progress is not a step back; progress is to move forward. And this is the frustration from many people after the third place."

He added: "If in January we have a situation where players are taken out, we must have a replacement.

"These young players need a guide. We cannot always say a 19-year-old guy is ready.

"He can be ready but this 19-year-old guy needs to his left or right side a 25-year-old or 27-year-old who can tell you, 'Look here, do this, look what I do and I'll guide you to a better performance'."

Asked if he was happy to remain as manager if the club continue to go backwards, Laszlo said: "I am not happy to not see progress but I am not unhappy to stay in this chair, as long as I see - with all the problems that we have - a clear solution, a clear structure.

"A structure must always be communicated for everybody.

"You must not only say internally what you want."

Laszlo, who also urged the Tynecastle boo-boys to lay off Michael Stewart, added: "We must wake up; we can't ignore the situation.

"The year before last, the club were also in the same situation: end of the season, eighth position.

"This is my problem: we come up - third position. Going back again, something is wrong.

"We showed everybody we can move up and I would like to keep this - this is in my blood. Nobody can take this out of me, nobody.

"I am angry about this, about everything."

Laszlo revealed he speaks "every week" with majority shareholder Vladimir Romanov, who snubbed his pleas for fresh blood in August.

But he was reluctant to divulge precisely what the pair had discussed.

"I know how far I can go in interviews and sometimes I must stop talking about this," Laszlo said.

"In every club you have problems, but if you ask me about the board and the owner, I try to resolve it

internally."

Laszlo believes Romanov shares his frustration at Hearts' poor start to the season and insisted he was not looking only for financial backing.

"I am sure if you are the owner of a club, you also suffer a little bit," he said.

"The problem is not the money, the problem is the situation."