Lawrence Shankland says the Hearts players were laughing at the chaos against Almeria by the time they returned to the dressing room - playing the furore down as "nothing major."
The Jambos were trailing 1-0 to the La Liga side in Spain when a challenge from Alex Cochrane caused all sorts of bedlam. An Almeria player grabbed the Hearts left-back by the throat and both benches then spilled onto the pitch in a mass brawl with a clip of the madness going viral on social media.
With tensions flaring in the friendly, Robbie Neilson called a stop to the action and returned his players to the dressing room to prevent things kicking off again. Hearts now focus on their return to Premiership action against Kilmarnock next weekend and Scotland striker Shankland insists they won't be thinking too much about the abandoned friendly.
He said: “The initial incident, Alex has just left a wee bit on the boy. It happens in every game of football. The big boy at the back has obviously reacted and that's what's caused our reaction. But it all honesty it wasn't anything major.
"I think it got out of control a wee bit. The manager just felt it was best to call it a day in case anything else silly happened after that. That was probably a sensible decision, to be honest.
“We were just laughing when we got back to the dressing room. With the initial incident with Alex, if that's where it stopped then nothing would have been made about it. It was the boy's reaction to that by charging over and sort of pushing Alex by the throat. You can't really have that sort of thing happening to your team-mate so everyone rushes over to sort it out. It was done after that.
“These things tend to blow up. That's the internet these days. It's interesting the amount of people who want to watch it. For us it was nothing major and nobody was that bothered about it as soon as we got back here (to the La Cala resort).
“There was a couple of hard challenges, aye. It was quite a competitive game for being a friendly to start with. Sometimes they can get like that.
"It's two different cultures and different people, so the understanding at times is a bit broken as well. But nah, it wasn't much and I don't think I'll be thinking about it much from now on.”
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