Unhappy Robbie Neilson admitted he was as frustrated as the Hearts support who turned on their team after their pathetic Pittodrie performance.
It was Aberdeen who cut the gap on the Jambos to just four points and had blown the fight for third place right open. Hearts were 3-0 down after less than half-an-hour and Neilson knows that just isn’t good enough or at the standards that is expected at his club.
He said: “I certainly do because I was as frustrated as they were. They paid their money to come up here, it’s a long journey on the train, expensive…to go and watch that. I thought that we were miles off where we need to be and where we have been as well. The first half until we changed it a wee bit then got into it in the second half we didn't want first or second contact and didn't put it in behind them.
"That was a massive frustration and Aberdeen were up for it and we weren't. You know it's going to be first and second contact when you come here and we just didn't compete for it.”
Neilson responded by taking Alex Cochrane off in the first half but he insisted a chunk of his team could easily have joined him. “I could have taken three or four off at that stage,” the Hearts head coach admitted.
“I just felt Stephen’s experience would help and I felt he came on and settled us down a little bit, because McCrorie was causing us a lot of problems. Stephen handled it better.”
Neilson knows it is now going to be a fight to finish best of the rest in the Premiership and he has to get his team back up for it. He conceded: “It was always going to be. We have two teams behind us showing a bit of form while we’ve been huffing and puffing and we need to get back to it now.
“If you had said to me before the World Cup break we’d be in this position when we were five or six points back of teams I’d probably have taken it. But we’ve had opportunities to get ourselves further ahead and we haven’t taken it, and we need to get back to it now.”
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