Michael Weir: Victory at Raith must be Hibs' target

If Hibs are to achieve their objective of promotion, they're going to have to do it the hard way.

Alan Stubbs has seen his team rebuild their confidence

If somebody had said to me at the start of the season that we’d finish third, I’d have been pretty disappointed. But we’ve got to give Falkirk credit for keeping going and capitalising when we lost our way.

We’ve had a pretty strong finish to the season but that slump through March and early April is the reason we now face six huge games if we want to go up.

At least now we know where we stand and exactly what we need to do. We’ll just need to deal with it now, but I’ve got no doubt that we’re good enough.

The fact we’ve got our form back in recent weeks is massive for us because it would have been hard for us just to flick a switch to restore it when we needed it. At least we’re going into the play-offs with our confidence restored.

We now know we can’t underestimate any teams or treat any of the games lightly. Even if we win the first leg against Raith Rovers, we have to be bang at it for the second game because we know what happened against Hamilton two years ago. We can’t start slowly either because we could end up leaving ourselves with too much to do like we did against Rangers last year. There will be no taking our foot off the gas in these games.

Raith have got some good momentum and they’ve shown before that they can beat us so we will have to be at our best in both games if we want to get past them. We must go to Kirkcaldy with the mindset that we need to win the game – we can’t go into any of these games thinking a draw will be okay. We need to try and win it and give ourselves a boost for the return leg at Easter Road. Raith will be right up for this game, so if we go into it slack, we’ll get turned over.

I’d like to think the big-game atmosphere around these ties will help Hibs because these are generally the games we’ve done best in this season. It’s all about handling the situation we’re in.

It doesn’t matter how we go up – we just need to make sure that by the end of these six games Hibs are back in the Premiership.