Hearts captain for 7-1 mauling insists team must move on quickly
Hearts defender Stephen Kingsley will aim to put his embarrassment and frustration aside and ensure Sunday’s Celtic Park mauling does not have lasting effects.
Wouter Vrancken’s team have no time to feel sorry for themselves after their 7-1 defeat as they now face another difficult task in the Conference League.
A trip to Turkey to face Mo Salah’s Trabzonspor awaits on Thursday and Hearts will need to quickly learn the lessons dished out by the Premiership champions in Glasgow.
When asked about his post-match emotions, Kingsley said: “Embarrassment, with the first half in terms of the way we lost the goals. We shot ourselves in the foot countless times.
“Celtic were clinical, fair play to them, but I just felt like we played right into their hands. We gave them exactly what they wanted. Made too many mistakes. Two set-pieces to start off, it kills you straight away.
“It was just a calamity of errors. After that, every error we made seemed to be exposed. They were good at it. Obviously, they’re a great counter-attacking team.
“We knew that if we gave the ball away in dangerous areas, they had the pace, they had the power, they had the quality to go and punish you. So that’s what’s most frustrating about it, that we played into their hands.”
‘We can’t let it fester’
Kingsley captained Hearts on Sunday and knows he and other experienced team-mates have a major job off the pitch this week.
“It’s one of those results that if you linger on it, then you can let it fester and seep into future performances,” the 32-year-old said. “But we can’t have that. It’s up to myself as one of the more experienced players, the other boys in the changing room that are a bit older, maybe the boys that have been here for a bit longer than some of the new ones, to make sure that we try to put this to bed.
“We look at it, obviously, and we look at things that we’ve done wrong. To be honest, we probably know that ourselves after this game.
“Then we put it to bed and move on to the next game because the next one’s not going to get any easier. We’ve obviously got European competition again on Thursday, another hard game away. So we need to bounce back quick and really try to put on a performance that we can be proud of.”
Hearts had travelled to Glasgow as the Premiership’s leading scorers and aiming to cut the gap on Celtic to two points.
“Myself, and I’m sure the other boys, will be in and around the group and make sure that we’re picking everyone up,” Kingsley said. “Because we believe in what we’ve got in our team.
“We didn’t show it on Sunday, quite obviously. But we believe that we’ve got something special in our changing room. I feel like we’ve shown that in large spells of the opening part of our season. This is hopefully a blip in an otherwise successful season.”