Steven Naismith expressed his disappointment at the first 45 minutes a Heart of Midlothian fell to a 3-1 defeat at Dundee.
The Hearts head coach lamented the team’s defending, as well as the application and energy.
Read or listen to everything Naismith said below:
What did you make of that?
I’m disappointed, you get the credit for last week’s performance but you don’t see that for the first 45 minutes, it was really poor. The first 20 minutes was a battle, it was just a fight but they seemed to be picking up the second balls, we were second to them, we were dipping our toe in, we weren’t aggressive enough. We had one on the edge of their box, potentially a chance and we allow the defensive player to come back in and win it. In our defensive third, they seemed to be picking up the balls. That had a lot to do with it. It was like deja-vu from the first game here last season where we were sluggish and slow, they got the better of 50-50s. The three goals we lose are poor. It was our downfall. We gave up possession, we didn’t defend well enough and it gave up the goal. The second goal we have three opportunities to put pressure on the ball and we don’t. We just sit, that energy from last week wasn’t there.
Does the two goals at the end of the half kill the game?
That’s game management and I don’t think we deal with it well enough. I felt in the second half we had more of a threat. We score one and within that we had two really good chances. If one of them goes in with 10 or 15 minutes to go it would be like the games we won 3-2 last season, you give yourself an opportunity. That’s disappointing, Dundee managed the game well. They slowed it down, stopped the game, got some treatment, killed any momentum we had.
What was the thinking beind the change in formation?
I felt it gives us a bit more security at the back. Dundee changed their shape as well. I don’t think was down to that. Our outside centre halves were stepping into the game, playing 30 yards from Dundee’s goal. I think the biggest problem today was our application and quality. We gave the ball away cheaply but we weren’t willing to have that energy we had last week.
Were you surprised by Dundee’s change in shape?
No, we had an idea that we thought they might just because their performance last week and their change to a four and got a bit of success. I think we could have caused them as many problems as they did us. It was more our bad defending that gave up the goals.
It’s very rare your team unravel so quickly?
It’s two minutes we didn’t make the right decisions that ultimately takes it from 1-0 to 3-0 but even in the second half I thought the pressure we had, I was thinking, ‘Yes, we’ve got one, we’ve got it at a good time’. We had two more chances. In the second half we have got to take those chances and in the first half we didn’t have enough energy, that’s what ultimately cost us the three points today.
