Jack Ross reveals Hibs dressing-room mood after 'toughing it out' at Kilmarnock
Kevin Nisbet’s penalty on 27 minutes was the difference at Rugby Park, with the Hibees back up to third place in the Premiership ahead of Aberdeen’s clash with Celtic on Sunday.
Hibs have amassed 24 points from their opening 12 matches and have also clocked up six clean sheets. With Nisbet the top scorer in the league on seven goals, Ross admitted that he could not be happier with his team going into next weekend’s Scottish Cup semi-final against Capital rivals Hearts.
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Hide Ad"If you come into my changing room, you'll see how happy a place that is," said Ross, "because it's not easy winning here. We played really well last week and created umpteen opportunities and drew the game, but today we had to tough it out. I'm really, really pleased – I think that's a sign of how far we've come.
"It's become much less of a trend to play with two strikers because there are only certain formations that enable you to do so and we've used both. But you have to work hard at other aspects of it. We constantly reinforce that for us to play that way, we must utilise it properly and equally, the strikers need to play well. At the moment, what they are giving us with their performance levels and goal return is justifying playing that way.
"The defensive players have been terrific all season. When we reflected on last season, the one thing we knew we had to be better at was defensively as a whole team as we just conceded too many goals last year. Our record this year is very good, with the number of clean sheets and defensively in general. Two back-to-back away clean sheets is very good and individually they've all performed very well, either in a back three or back four at times. They are in a good place and I think we are seeing the fruits of that hard work that we've put on the training ground in terms of their performances."