Huge Hearts support heading to Motherwell after Rangers half-time talks to 'get s*** together'

At half-time inside Tynecastle Park’s home dressing room on Monday evening, Derek McInnes delivered perhaps the most telling team-talk of his managerial career. He kept it simple, hoping to inspire Hearts to overturn the 1-0 deficit in the second half against Rangers. What transpired was beyond most people’s expectations. Even the men he preached to were rattled by their first-half inadequacy.

“To be honest, I think most of us felt the same,” admitted the Hearts forward Claudio Braga. “We were just like: ‘Hopefully it comes to half-time so we can get together, get our s**t together and just talk with each other, figure out a lot of things that we need.’ I never doubted that we could do it but we knew that if we kept playing like that, we would definitely lose the game. So we needed to just keep everything together.

“Probably at half-time everybody would be sure that we would lose, I would say. Even we were a little bit like, 'we're not doing a good game', but we proved ourselves that we can do it. The gaffer was just straight up: ‘Man up a little bit. They were winning every duel and that's on us.’ The pressure was also not right, so we just changed a little bit and with Spitz [Blair Spittal] coming on, it gave us a little bit more ball, I would say. Beni [Baningime] and Marc [Leonard] started having more touches and then also everybody else started flowing a little bit better.”

Sounds easy. It wasn’t. Hearts had to dig into their deepest reserves for two goals, one from Stephen Kingsley and one from Lawrence Shankland. “We started really well in the first half,” commented Braga. “I didn't feel that there was going to be a bad day in the first half, in the beginning. But then it changed a little bit the momentum with the goal. We stopped having ball. And then second half, it's just a completely new game, I would say. We just figured out a lot of things.

“The Kingsley one is really difficult, because you can't really miss that ball. But it's not an easy ball. He's just an experienced guy, and amazing. And Shanks, another guy, when the ball goes there for him, he probably just celebrates before.” Hearts have now come from behind in their last three games to beat Motherwell, Hibs and Rangers. That resilience underlines the togetherness of the squad.

“I've said this a few times already, we are not known for being the tiki-taka team or the team that plays the beautiful football, but we're known for giving everything for each other. The game is not over until it's over, and that was the case on Monday. A lot of times this season, we've proved that we push each other and it's just a family inside.

“I'm not saying we're bad at football. We're good, I think. But I think our biggest, if you need to put a name [description] on us, that would be probably like working for each other and the hunger that we have in the team. Of course we can play football, but we know that if football sometimes is not working, then we just need to fight for each other.”

Hearts sit three points clear of Celtic at the top of the Premiership with three matches remaining. They visit Motherwell on Saturday night, then host Falkirk before a potential last-day title decider at Celtic Park. “It's three games, so we play two away, one home against very tough teams. All of them are incredibly tough, so we need to maybe not get these heart attacks a little bit every time and just start games from the beginning. But yeah, if the result is the same, we don't care.”

Braga conceded that staying grounded and not dreaming of a first Hearts top-flight title in 66 years is challenging. “It's hard, I'm not going to lie, but we're professionals. We try to be as professional as we can,” stressed the Portuguese. “I think it's been a long time - but maybe a little bit more now - that people are talking that maybe this could be possible. We've already had that [outside noise] and through the championship we just decided that we take it game by game. We dealt with Rangers, and now it's Motherwell, and that's it. We don't care about Falkirk or Celtic for now. Hopefully we win that game, and then we go for the other one.”

He hasn’t even had time to process being named PFA Scotland Player of the Year, an award which came late on Sunday evening just hours before the Rangers match. “No, to be honest, no. I didn't even celebrate that. It was too late that I found out. Straight away: ‘Okay, you need to sleep, so just go sleep.’ But it's amazing. To be honest, Monday’s game was so important that I couldn't even celebrate properly. You know what I dream of happening. I don't need to tell you. In the end, of course, we're still first place.”

Braga is too courteous and professional to discount Rangers from the title race, but realistically this race is now between Hearts and Celtic. Defeat at Tynecastle leaves the Ibrox side seven points off the leaders. The possibility of fantasy becoming reality for Tynecastle fans is creating some unprecedented nervous tension. Around 4,500 of them have sold out the allocation for Motherwell and will travel west on Saturday hoping for another colossal result.

“Yeah, it's three games to go, it's kind of crazy,” said Braga. “We were all in the locker room, everybody was looking at each other, it's three games to go. It's been fast, and we are still top of the league. It's not even easy to describe it with words, I'm not going to lie. It's just a crazy feeling.”

Tynecastle was as raucous as ever on Monday as fans created an atmosphere which, time and again, has driven their team on to achieve vital results this season. “It's been a lot like this so, of course, when we play at Tynecastle, that's obviously a reason that we never lost at Tynecastle. We get driven by the stands, and Monday was again outstanding from the public. There have been a lot of games that have been actually really loud but today, the importance of the game, some people could feel tense and it wasn't the case. Everybody was just pushing and trying, even when we were losing.”