Daniel Stendel: 'St Mirren is not my biggest game as Hearts manager'

Ilkay Durmus of St Mirren and Hearts defender Aaron Hickey could face one another again on Wednesday

“It is an important game but I don’t want to have the feeling that it is the one and only game that decides it.” Hearts manager Daniel Stendel is determined not to overhype Wednesday’s visit to St Mirren as the Premiership’s relegation battle intensifies.

The league’s bottom club travel to second-bottom looking to close a three-point gap with nine games of the campaign remaining. Their German coach has been in charge since early December and is wary of increasing pressure on players trying to prevent a demotion at one of Scotland’s largest clubs.

“That is when we don’t win,” he admitted. “I think we can win. It’s not good when we give the the feeling we may not win, and then we have no chance. After this, we have eight games. It’s an important game, a big chance for us to improve our situation, and we want to use it.

“It’s a good chance to bring it all together at the bottom – Ross County, St Mirren, us and Hamilton. We all know how important the game is, but there is no difference between one game and the next.”

After wins against Rangers in the Scottish Cup and Hibs in the league, Stendel watched Hearts draw 1-1 with Motherwell at the weekend. That further raised spirits at the end of an encouraging week.

“It’s good. The last couple of games have been really good,” said Stendel. “We have been defending better as a team. It has given us more chances to win games. The situation [in the league] isn’t really so much better, but the feeling for the team is so much better. We have stabilised our game especially in our defence.

“After Aberdeen and the Scottish Cup game [against Airdrie in January], we were all thinking that we had good momentum but we changed that in the next games. I don’t want to say we have stabilised too much, but it is better.”

The inferrence is that there is still significant work to be done, a theory underlined by a glance at the league table. Victory in Paisley would be a monumental result in the context of Hearts deciding their own fate. Their manager feels his players can call upon an improving mentality.

“You can see after we go 1-0 down on Saturday, we weren’t so stable that we could just shrug it off, say ‘it doesn’t matter’ and play on. We needed a little bit of time to recover but we came back and I think we had chances to win the game,” said Stendel.

“Motherwell, after their win last Wednesday against Ross County, were better than they had been for weeks. They are third in the table but for a few weeks they had not played so well.

“You can see they are coming back to their normal form and they’re a really good team. But we competed very well with them. We both had chances to win. The result was okay when you look at the game, but one point doesn’t help us in our situation.”