Robbie Neilson has revealed he consulted Celtic and Rangers to prepare for Hearts' European campaign. The Jambos face Zurich in the Europa League playoff round this week as they bid for a place in the competition's lucrative group stage.
They travel to Switzerland for Thursday’s first leg before welcoming their opponents to Tynecastle for the return one week later. And Neilson and his team have been pondering how best to prepare for the trip to ensure their players are in tip-top shape while also handling a busy Scottish Premiership schedule.
Those discussions led the Hearts boss to making phone calls to Glasgow to get the lowdown on how Celtic and Rangers prepare for their own continental outings. Neilson revealed the club have decided against a pre-match training session at Zurich's Stadion Letzigrund, instead opting to complete preparations at their own Riccarton base before boarding the plane to Switzerland 24 hours ahead of kick-off.
Neilson explained to the Edinburgh Evening News : “I spoke to a couple of guys at the Old Firm teams about their experiences of these European games. Previously, what has always been done is that you would fly over, train at the stadium and do media.
“Nowadays you have a lot of media to do so the manager and a couple of players can miss the start of training sometimes. The team is training about eight o’clock at night having travelled all day. Then they get showered, they aren’t getting dinner till half past ten and maybe not getting to sleep until half past 12 or one o’clock.
“We felt we wanted to train here first and then travel. We will fly over, get to the stadium, do the media and have a walk around. Then we can go to bed because the players will have eaten beforehand. It’s more a physical preparation than tactical.”
