What happened inside the Hearts dressing room after defeat at Kilmarnock

Neil Critchley entered Rugby Park’s away dressing room feeling somewhat exasperated around 4.50pm on Sunday. He was met with an emotional scene as Hearts players and staff digested a bone-chilling 1-0 defeat by 10-man Kilmarnock. The head coach spoke to his squad but refused to lose his temper, even if he would have been perfectly justified in doing so.

There were heated exchanges between players seeking to break down what went wrong during the 90 minutes. Some engaged in strong debate, others sat quietly with their own thoughts. Spanish striker Musa Drammeh was visibly angry at full-time. He had to be calmed down and ushered away from Kilmarnock’s Brad Lyons and Liam Polworth by his goalkeeper, Craig Gordon.

Robbie Deas’ red card inside five minutes should have seen Hearts capitalise on their numerical advantage to win the match, but instead they lost to Bruce Anderson’s penalty for the hosts. As a result, they remain bottom of the Premiership 17 matches into the campaign.

Critchley delivered his message firmly and then left players to it. As he exited the dressing room to address media waiting upstairs in the post-match press conference, the squad resumed their own discussions. Critchley looked ashen-faced by the time he arrived to speak to reporters.

He gathered his thoughts and took time to speak to the Edinburgh News about what he had witnessed on the field and what happened in the dressing room. “I didn't shout and bawl. My blood was boiling, it still is, but I've sort of gone past anger. I'm bewildered by what I saw,” he admitted, candidly.

“Some of the decisions that we made on the pitch were bewildering, it was baffling. We played in front of Kilmarnock too much, we played into their hands. And when we did get the ball in and around the penalty area, our movement and our intelligence, our quality, was nowhere near the level. It's not like we didn't have enough attacking players on the pitch.

READ MORE: Critchley ‘shocked’ and ‘stunned’ as he criticises Hearts

“It's very hard to sum that performance up because I've not seen that [previously]. I said to the players: 'We need to put a mark in the sand, draw a line, and that can never happen again.' I feel sorry for the supporters who were there. Quite rightly, I'd be angry and booing by witnessing that because I'm shocked by that performance.

“I was stunned by what I saw. We started the game quite well, quite bright in the first few minutes. The sending off changes the course of the game. We then got caught in the emotion of the game, with the crowd being up for the next 10 minutes. We made poor decisions with the ball when we've got an extra man. We made poor decisions off the ball and one of them cost us the game. After that, we've had ample time against 10 men to get back into the game.

“We never looked like we were really going to score. Our quality, our decision-making, our intelligence and our sheer will and personality to make something happen was nowhere near the level. It was a really, really bad performance for the vast majority of that game and that's why we lost.”

Hearts’ overall club wage bill is at its highest level ever - £16.5m in the latest set of accounts to June 2024. Sitting bottom of the league - and losing to Kilmarnock after playing against 10 men for almost the entire afternoon - is wholly unacceptable.

Asked what can be done to address the issues above, Critchley admitted players were already holding their own inquests when he left the dressing room. “What we can do is we can come back into training. The players were talking about it in the dressing room, quite rightly, speaking when I left, about certain things which they'll need to do. We have to take responsibility as a group and speak about it openly, about taking individual responsibility, collective responsibility, to make sure that doesn't happen again.”

The Edinburgh club find themselves firmly embroiled in a relegation battle, requiring significantly more desire, energy and panache if they are to prevail over the coming months. Thursday’s UEFA Conference League tie against the Moldovan club Petrocub is hugely important in a European context as Hearts look to reach the tournament’s knockout round play-off. However, it is very much secondary to league survival.

Critchley is a straight-talker and Hearts supporters appreciate him for it. He sees what they see during a game and isn’t afraid to articulate it clearly afterwards. He will already have sussed out a number of Tynecastle players who simply aren’t of the required standard. Until the January transfer window opens, he can’t change personnel. Next month will be potentially-pivotal for the club.

“The bigger picture and the longer-term? Yes, you can't be reactive after one performance. We have to have a plan,” stated the head coach. “We have to have a strategy of how we want to move the club forward. And you can't deviate away from that just after one performance. We know what we want to do. We know where we want to try and get to, and that January is always hard to do that. But there are certain areas of the picture that we'll need to strengthen. And that won't change off the back of one performance.”