John McGlynn accuses players of buying into belief that they ‘just had to turn up’

By STEPHEN HALLIDAY
Published on Monday 13 August 2012 00:00

IF THE Hearts players had believed they just had to turn up at Easter Road to win yesterday, they would hardly have been alone in adopting that mindset.

After the Tynecastle club’s 5-1 Scottish Cup final mauling of Hibs in May, and their respective starts to the new SPL campaign the previous weekend, the vast majority of observers anticipated an away win.

But Hearts manager John McGlynn believes his team were guilty of buying into that notion and failing to adopt the right attitude.

“There was the 5-1 victory in the Scottish Cup Final in the last game of last season and then last week we came out of the blocks and got a good result against St Johnstone while Hibs on the other hand lost to Dundee United,” observed McGlynn.

“So this mental attitude which virtually everyone seemed to be talking about, that we could come here today and think it was just a matter of turning, backfired. It doesn’t matter how much you try to get it over to the players that it might not necessarily be the case.

“A derby game is a derby game and the form book goes out of the window. We lost out mentally by not applying ourselves and we didn’t do as well because it was not just a matter of turning up and winning the football match, It is not great from our point of view, so lessons are there to be learned.

“We never got going today. I thought the second half was more even but fair play to Hibs because they closed us down and pressed us. We fell into the trap by not helping ourselves as we gave the ball away cheaply and didn’t get anything flowing, so there’s a lesson to be learned.

“At times we were too open. I wasn’t happy with the performance. We never got going at all, so we’ve got to be grateful that, on a day when we’ve not played anywhere near the standard we can, we’ve taken a point.”

Hearts can still be relatively satisfied having taken four points from their first two matches, but Andrew Driver, who gave them their 29th minute lead before Leigh Griffiths cancelled it out, admitted the over-riding feeling among the Hearts players was that they had failed to do themselves justice.

“It was disappointing as we had high hopes coming here,” said Driver. “With the record we’ve had in recent years, we’ve done well here, but we were lucky to get away with a draw today. We’ve got to learn from what happened.

“I don’t know what it was, we didn’t win second balls, it seemed we weren’t as hungry as they were.

“Hopefully this is a learning process for us and we won’t get ahead of ourselves. We managed to get away with a draw, so we’ll learn from the mistakes as the attitude probably wasn’t right and make sure it doesn’t happen twice.”

Driver’s goal came as a result of his opportunism in following the ball in when Hibs’ debutant full-back Alan Maybury was short with a headed passback to goalkeeper Ben Williams.

“Ninety-nine times you follow it in and it gets headed back to the goalkeeper but there is the off chance of that one time it’ll fall to you, “ said Driver. “Luckily it did.”

Taken from the Scotsman