FOLLOW US ON TWITTER | FACEBOOK
Hearts head coach Robbie Neilson insists his team should be sitting with more points in the Premiership.
The Tynecastle outfit have now fallen five points adrift of leaders Celtic, just ten days after they failed to take the chance to climb to the summit following a narrow loss at St Johnstone.
Hearts were again left frustrated at the weekend in their bid to bounce back from that set-back as wasteful finishing for the second successive Saturday meant they drew a blank in a goal-less draw at home to Ross County.
Hearts currently lie third in the table with 11 points from seven matches but Neilson is not happy with their return so far.
Neilson said: “We should be sitting with more points, there’s no arguing with that.
“We should be sitting with more after last week against St Johnstone when we created five or six really good chances and didn’t take them, then lost a sucker punch.
“Against County, we picked up one point when we should be sitting with three.
“It’s five points dropped in the last two games, which is really frustrating, considering our performances have been there.”
Hearts came up against inspired goalkeeping from County’s Scott Fox as the shot-stopper denied the likes of Conor Sammon and Tony Watt on Saturday.
Neilson plans to put his squad through extra shooting practice in the build up to Friday’s televised encounter at Motherwell.
He added: “We prepare for the Motherwell game and it’s about converting these chances, so we’ll be working on a bit of finishing at training this week to make sure we polish it off and if we do get these chances against Motherwell, we’ll score them.”
Neilson, meanwhile, praised Alim Ozturk for producing a solid display at the weekend, three days after being stripped of the captaincy.
The Dutch-born Turkish player came on for the injured John Souttar after 30 minutes and helped the team keep a clean sheet against County.
Neilson, who unveiled midfielder Perry Kitchen as the new skipper last Wednesday, said: “I thought Alim came on and settled in well. It’s been a difficult period for Alim but he’s managed himself well, he’s trained well and you could see that with his performance when he came on.
“John took a dead leg but he’ll be fine. He started to cramp up on it as well so we felt it was best to get him off.”
