Hearts manager Neil Critchley says that his players don’t have a mental block in the Edinburgh derby despite their loss at Easter Road meaning they have failed to beat Hibs in the last four meetings between the sides.
Critchley’s men also lost the first game between the teams this season at Tynecastle by the same 2-1 scoreline, and have now won just one of the last eight clashes with their city rivals, a 1-0 win at Easter Road in late 2023.
Hearts dominated the first half of this latest derby, but wilted in the second half as Hibs took control of the game and deservedly took the three points in the end, but when asked if his players lacked the mental strength to prevail in these fixtures, Critchley said: "No, I don't think it's at that stage yet. Whatever team you're playing, whoever you're playing, you have to show the right mentality in every game.
“In the first half I felt we did, the second half we didn't. For us to become the team I want us to become in the future, our identity, you can see it's sort of in a transitional moment and we've got to get better at becoming the team that we want to become for the whole game.
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“That takes quality, that takes the right belief, the right mentality in what you're doing. We suffered because of our defensive organisation and our quality in the second half.
“There's a fallout after every derby game, isn't there? But it's my job to keep as balanced as possible and I know that's difficult because emotions run high and everyone has an opinion.
“I have to make sure that I block out some of that noise and watch the game and speak to the players and take responsibility for what we didn't do well enough and learn from it and do better at it. It's as simple as that.
"Whenever you lose a big game, there's always going to be criticism, whether that's justified or not or whether it's right or not. It just happens.”
Critchley admitted that his team didn’t deserve anything after a Jekyll and Hyde showing in the capital.
"Not with our second-half performance, no,” he said.
“For the first half, we were a slightly better team, had good control of the game, played the game how we wanted to play after giving away a really poor first goal.
“And then in the second half, I think we just lost belief in what we were doing a little bit, which is not like us. If you don't get your defensive organisation right, and you don't then keep the ball, that allows the opposition to build momentum in the game. That's what happened.
“It’s taken a great strike to win the game, but I was really disappointed with how we played the game in the second half.
"Look, it's a bad defeat. It's a derby defeat so it's not nice at all. The players have had enough praise in the last few months. Today we'll get criticised and rightly so for the way we played in the second half. That was not us on the pitch.
“But we've taken six points from nine this week. We'd have liked to have taken nine. We'd have liked to have taken six points and maybe in a different way as well.
“However, we've still got games to go to get to the top six and find us in the split. And that's our focus after a really important game in the cup next Friday night.”
