Why Hearts need to shore up their defence to remain entertainingly attack-minded

Losing has kind of been Hearts’ thing this season. Fleabag has her look to camera, DS Arnott has his waist coats, Jack Jarvis takes the point too far (“that’s plenty”) and Hearts lose football matches, whether it’s under the leadership of Craig Levein, Austin MacPhee or, now, Daniel Stendel.

However, Wednesday night’s defeat to Kilmarnock still represented a small, not-all-that insignificant step in the right direction. At least it was an entertaining defeat.

The Tynecastle crowd has been used to seeing their team limp to apathetic 1-0 losses where the opponent only has to stay compact, get their noses in front and then let a clueless attacking opponent play square balls and aimless punts for the rest of the, erm, “drama”.

It was soul crushing. Not just because results weren’t forthcoming, but because it was horrendous to watch.

That certainly wasn’t the case when Killie came to town. At least not over the full 90 minutes.

Hearts started with real verve and gusto. The visitors looked dangerous at the other end, but with the hosts sprinting the play forward at every opportunity, the ball urgently zipping about the place as the crowd roared them on, you’d have backed the home side to gain the advantage and take the game from there.

Then, when things looked completely hopeless, they staged what was nearly a comeback for the ages. They netted twice in the last 11 minutes and had a good few other chances before the game was up, with new favourite Liam Boyce uncharacteristically spurning a couple of them, including one in injury-time that would’ve brought the house down.

It was a costly defeat. Not only did it send them back to the foot of the table, results elsewhere have made it appear like it’s now a three-way battle to avoid the two relegation spots: St Mirren, Hamilton and Hearts.

But it was different to the other defeats. It was entertaining, it had spirit, it had a never-say-did attitude. Continue to play like that, get Michael Smith and Aaron Hickey back from injury (I’m now refusing to believe Peter Haring is ever coming back, it hurts too much to keep hoping otherwise) and Hearts should have more than enough to at least finish 10th.

That’s all well and good, though you may have noticed something in my positive spin of the match earlier: the lack of any positive action from the hosts between Kilmarnock’s first goal and Hearts making it 3-1.

That’s because the men in maroon were not full of verve and gusto. At times they even resembled Levein’s team: downtrodden, lost, out of ideas.

Confidence is so incredibly important in football, but it may be even more so to Stendel and this Hearts team.

Confidence adds an extra spring in the step; it allows for instinctive ingenuity; it encourages a player to run that little bit harder, to go that little bit longer. The ball sticks to the foot more. The shot flies closer to goal.

Without that confidence, eroded down through the concessions of goals one, two and three, Hearts didn’t look like a team implementing the art of gegenpressing. They just looked hopeless. That part of the game was not entertaining. It just appeared inevitable.

The players seem to be enjoying life under Stendel. They’re getting more freedom. They’re being encouraged to play the game in a manner most would like it to be: high intensity, high tempo, plenty of options in attack.

The problem is that this feeling will only last as long as the results do. If the team is going to continue to defend in the manner they have over the last two games, they’ll continue to ship more goals than they can counteract at the other end. Confidence will then evaporate, the press and the style of attack won’t be as effective, and they’ll go back to looking rudderless once more. It won’t be entertaining. It’ll be Hearts 2019/20.

Stendel has to find a way to combat this. He’s said in each of their last two matches that the team have gotten away from playing their game. Now, I’m no coach, but it seems to me that they have largely been playing “their game” and opponents have found ways to exploit that. A dynamic striker in the mould of Stevie May or Eamonn Brophy thrive on the space left either side of the centre-backs by Sean Clare and Aidy White each pushing so far up the park at the same time. In hindsight, the biggest mistake from Steven Gerrard in Rangers' defeat at Tynecastle was persisting with the 4-3-3 in which, in his own words, he plays with two No.10s instead of two wingers. (Well, that and playing Jon Flanagan for a half.)

You don’t want to see this Hearts attack lose the ferocity they showed for about half of Wednesday’s game, but that will happen naturally if they keep having to play from behind. It's time to tighten things up to keep the entertainment going.