'We owed Hibs fans a win' - clean sheet keeper on 'weight lifted' by second league victory of season

Hibs players felt a weight lift off their shoulders courtesy of just a second league win of the season. And stand-in goalkeeper Jordan Smith believes the squad were motivated by a desire to repay supporters for keeping faith with a struggling side.

Yesterday’s 3-0 win over Motherwell at Fir Park saw David Gray’s men lift themselves off the foot of the Scottish Premiership table, allowing the thousand-plus visiting fans to celebrate a rare Scottish Premiership triumph in a campaign of errors, ill discipline and catastrophic collapses. The win came just a few days after the midweek draw with Aberdeen, which had seen Hibs score two injury-time goals – to the Dons’ one – in a madcap six-goal thriller.

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Smith, who replaced No.1 Josef Bursik against Aberdeen and retained his place against the Steelmen, said: “It feels like a weight has been lifted, almost. But that’s got to be the minimum required for a football club of this stature.

“If we do that going forward, get that little bit of luck, we give ourselves every chance. We’ve not beaten ourselves. To a man, everyone performed brilliantly.

“Internally, we know we’ve not been good enough. The fans have stuck with us, they’ve been fantastic and turned out in their numbers again. They were loud the whole way through.

“We just said: ‘We owe it to ourselves – and we owe it to them to turn in better performances.’ It’s alright keeping using a hard luck story about this goal here, that goal there. Ultimately, it makes little difference because the results are there, and we are fighting at the wrong end of the division.

“The game on Tuesday when we score really late probably makes a massive difference. They’ve been going against us but that went for us. So it’s been a bit of a momentum shift, and we needed to make sure we got the three points by any means necessary to feel that momentum and carry that on.”

Admitting that Hibs had been required to hold their nerve to get the job done at Fir Park, Smith said: “There’s a nervousness you can sense; everyone can. But we need to put that to bed.

“Games are going to be tight at this level. Teams are similar, with all due respect.

“I’m not going to say it comes down to who wants it more because I don’t think anyone doesn’t want it. But it’s having that belief and that fight.

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“It’s gone against us one too many times. So we just needed to look internally and come up with the answers. We found that answer.

“The game has gone by so fast. Within the game, I don’t think you think ‘what if’ at 2-0 up. I’d like to think all the boys think like that. It’s probably more something you’d sense as a fan or onlookers.

“We just had a job to do. You probably saw that steely resilience, boys getting behind each other for blocks, whatever, celebrating them like goals almost. So we concentrated on the task in hand. But, yeah, to go three goals ahead was an absolute weight lifted for us.”