Hibs Ladies battling on three fronts

Rhonda Jones of Glasgow City and Lizzie Arnott of Hibs battle it out in last season's Scottish Cup Final

The Hibees trail their opponents by five points with just six league fixtures remaining between now and the final match on October 30.

Arnot’s hat-trick on Sunday helped Chris Roberts’ side to an emphatic 9-0 victory over Rangers at Albyn Park with City also sticking to their end of the bargain with a 3-0 win at Stirling University.

But for 20-year-old Arnot, a Scotland internationalist, this season won’t be defined by what happens in two months’ time with Hibs having won the League Cup in June, a Scottish Cup quarter-final tie with Celtic to come this weekend, and a venture into Europe’s elite when the draw for the Champions League Round of 32 is made in Nyon, Switzerland on Thursday.

“We don’t just want to settle for the League Cup, we’ve still got the Scottish Cup to play for so if we won two cups and missed out on the league then it would be great,” Arnot said. “We haven’t won the cups for a while so to get two would be a big success. We’ll just have to see what happens. It will be tough and it’s not the best thing having to rely on other teams doing you a favour but football can be a funny game. We just need to keep going.

“Obviously we’ve got the big draw on Thursday so it’s really exciting but quite nerve-racking as well. We know a lot of the teams we could face are in a different league to us but we’ve just got to enjoy the experience. I just hope we don’t draw Glasgow City which would be really disappointing given some of the teams we could face.”

Meanwhile, in SWPL 2, Hearts lost ground in their race for promotion having been held to a 1-1 draw at Buchan. The Capital club are now three points adrift of Glasgow Girls, who swept aside Hutchison Vale 4-0, at the top.