Accies Defender urges team to secure defeat against Hearts

Sep 24 2009 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

DEFENDER Mark McLaughlin has urged his team-mates they can break Hearts on Saturday by showing the same desire as they did to beat Hibs a fortnight ago.

Marko admits Hamilton weren’t good enough to deserve more than a point from Saturday’s 0-0 draw against Falkirk, and said they must do better when they come up against Csaba Laszlo’s men at Tynecastle.

He said: “At Hearts on Saturday we want to put on the same performance as we did against Hibs.

“We showed against Hibs that on our day we’re a good team, but we need to do that week in, week out and get that kind of consistency.

“It will be a hard game, Hearts are a good side, but we need to go to Tynecastle confident that we can get something.”

On Saturday’s draw, McLaughlin said: “It was disappointing. As the home team we should be trying to win games like that, and I mean no disrespect to Falkirk who, on the day, were probably the better side.

“But winning your home games is massive if you want to stay in this league, and on Saturday we just weren’t at the races.

“While I thought the defence looked OK, going forward we just weren’t good enough and must do better – hopefully next week we can put that right.”

Former Clyde stopper McLaughlin did concede, though, that four points from back-to-back home games against Hibs and Falkirk was a decent return – particularly after Hamilton’s poor start to the season.

He said: “Going into the games we’d have taken four points from six, but you start getting greedy when you go and beat Hibs, and when you’ve got a home game against Falkirk you hope you can take the points – again, that’s no disrespect to them – but we’ll take the point and build on it.”

One major blow from the game, however, was the news that striker Derek Lyle is out for the rest of this season after damaging cruciate ligaments.

And McLaughlin said: “That was massively disappointing because Derek has come in and been great for us, but he’s also a great guy to have around the dressing room.

“It gives somebody else an opportunity and they need to start taking it.

“We’ve chopped and changed the squad a bit in recent weeks and while some of the guys that have been brought in are good players, to help us hey need to adapt to Scottish football sooner rather than later.”