Motherwell and Hearts lock horns this week as both sides seek a return to Premiership winning ways.
Alfred Johansson says he’ll only focus on his Motherwell team selection rather than the potential curveballs Hearts could throw at his Fir Park side.
The Steelmen host the Jambos on Sunday with Wouter Vrancken’s outfit less than 72 hours removed from their Conference League loss at Trabzonspor. In that game, forward Rogers Mato started at full-back, left-back Stephen Kingsley was deployed on the other side of defence, and right-back Jordi Altena started in midfield amid mounting injury concerns.
Hearts are likely to require more square pegs in round holes a week on from their last Premiership outing, a 7-1 loss to champions Celtic, but it’s of no concern to Johansson. He has been impressed by counterpart Vrancken’s willingness to stick with his beliefs amid difficulty, but as Motherwell seek to snap a five game losing run following a 3-2 loss at Kilmarnock, the manager can only concentrate over his team’s three points search.
Motherwell manager on Hearts visit
Johansson said: “I think that he will not change anything. He seemed quite strong on his things, the way that the team have been playing. It's definitely going to be more difficult to predict their starting 11 based on that they have a lot of a lot of injuries and so on. But it's not the most important thing how they set up the team. It's how we set up our team. So I'll be thinking much, much more about than who is playing left full back in Hearts.
“For us, I think it's still collective mistakes. Maybe not the whole team, but sometimes I felt that when when we've been attacking, we haven't always had the numbers in the box, something that we've been speaking about previously. And that's not because of an individual mistake, it's because it's not strong enough yet. The behaviours that we try to put into every people's job description is not automatic enough yet, but it will be.
“Against Killie, we saw the 10s being a lot in the opposition box and scoring goals, and having shots, and so on. So that's one part of it. And the other part is like, for instance, backline, right? If someone is losing a duel, there should be someone covering him, and these things we need to continue to work, work, work.
“Because we can't be reliant on people winning all the duels or so on or things like this. So that's it. And if you are referring to the goalkeeper playing out from the back, then it was very similar last year. Got punished from that. Conceding goals from that last season too. It's just a matter of being good enough and it's so easy to forget these things now, right?”
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Left-back Emmanuel Longelo insists Motherwell must remain calm amid the growing noise surrounding a poor run. He added: "We're all calm. We've just got to stay calm in the storm and get through it. I feel like we've all been level-headed. We need to be level-headed. We're still going to stick to how we want to play. We just need to cut out a couple of errors and whatnot. The way we play, there's going to be some errors at times. But when it goes well, it's fantastic. When it doesn't go so well, it can be hard. But we've got to stick together and we'll get through it."