Jack Ross hails hat-trick hero Kevin Nisbet and explains key Hibs change of tactics

Hibs head coach Jack Ross showered hat-trick hero Kevin Nisbet with praise after his big summer signing bagged a treble in a 4-1 blitz of Livingston.

The £250,000 capture from Dunfermline Athletic scored his first goals for the club and, along with a strike from Christian Doidge, earned Hibs their second win of the 2020/21 season as the Hibees moved top of the Premiership for 24 hours.

Nisbet’s goals will catch the headlines, but his overall play was strong too, and Ross could not have been happier with the 23-year-old’s performance.

“I’ve been really pleased with how Kevin has settled in,” said Ross. “He’s made a big impression with everybody from the first time he trained with us.

"People were impressed with how good a player he was. He played last week for me as well and played a big part in the first goal. But because he didn’t score some people judge him on that. So to score and then go on to get a hat-trick is brilliant for him.”

Ross tweaked his formation for the match against Livingston, bringing in Doidge to partner Nisbet in a 4-4-2 formation, a far cry from the 3-5-2 system used against Kilmarnock last weekend.

However, the switch paid off handsomely, with Daryl Horgan also impressing after being handed his first start of the campaign.

On the changes, Ross said: “You do something like that as a manager and it doesn’t work and you get criticised. And it’s the same with in-game changes. Such is the nature of the beast nowadays. But we struggled here last season and Livingston’s record here overall is brilliant. So we looked long and hard at it and picked a team that we felt would deal with them in possession and then let us do what we wanted to do when we had the ball.

"We wanted to get the ball wide and into the box and to do that you really need two strikers on the park. On another day it might not have worked but today it worked a treat for us.”