IT took just three minutes of Edinburgh derby action on Tuesday night for Simon Murray to acquire the kind of hero status which largely eluded his dad Gary over the course of three injury-ravaged seasons at Easter Road in the early ‘80s.

While 18 goals in 80 starts wasn’t the worst goal record for a man Bertie Auld picked up from Montrose for £50,000, Hibs were in the second tier then and Murray Snr’s career never quite took off after he picked up a serious knee problem in a reserve match. Notching the winning goal, like young Simon did, in front of your own fans, in the first all Premiership capital grudge match for four years, was a shortcut to a different kind of fame.

“My dad had told me a few things about it and I have watched it on TV but I have never actually been to one before last night,” said Simon. “He just said ‘go and work hard and grab yourself a goal’.”

This Murray did alright, what he called ‘the most memorable goal of his career so far by a distance’ - although it turned out it wasn’t just his father that he was trying to emulate on the night. Tasked with kicking him out of form slump which had seen him drop out of the team after claiming 10 goals in his first seven starts, Calvin Charlton, the club’s head of performance analysis, spent a few days showing him footage of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, and his capacity to hit the ball early, hard and on target. He certainly took a page out of that book against Hearts as he turned past John Souttar in the box and lashed in a high right foot shot which was beyond Hearts goalkeeper Jon McLaughlin in a flash.

“I was watching a few videos through the week, seeing how strikers get their head down and lash at it, so that was my first thought, just get it hard an on target,” he said. “I watched a few clips of Vardy and he puts his head down and hits it. So I did that early on in the game and maybe that helped because the keepers aren’t fully switched on yet. We haven’t really watched those videos before but when you watch premier league players, it is good to study what they do and luckily I watched it this week. So I will keep watching him!”

If there was one moment which summed up how far out of the picture Murray was it came at Hampden on Saturday. Searching for a man to get his side a goal, Neil Lennon turned to young Oli Shaw, not Murray, and the 19-year-old obliged with his first Hibs goal. Perhaps it was thoughts of his own mortality which spurred Murray back to his best form too.

“You don’t aim to have a dip but sometimes you are just not getting the bounce of the ball or the bit of luck you need,” he said. “The ball is maybe going behind you or a couple of yards in front of you and it just doesn’t click but if you keep working hard then it does come back.

“I couldn’t have hoped for a better time for that to happen,” he added. “You want to play in every game so I was disappointed [at Hampden], it wouldn’t be any good if I wasn’t, but he [Shaw] did brilliant when he went on.

“I couldn’t have hoped for a better derby. I don’t feel like I played unbelievably well, I just got the goal. It was an unbelievably tense match to be involved in. It was my first experience of the crowd and everything else but it was great and it is something I will always remember.

I can’t actually remember hearing anything when I scored. I just went into a daze. It was like ‘what’s just happened?’ and then I just started running. I think I did a knee slide of some sort but it was great.”

Hibs are a better team than their results suggest. The return of Ofir Marciano in goal gave them a more solid look, they have pace out wide and the likes of Dylan McGeouch and John McGinn are more than a match for most Scottish midfields. Gathering momentum in fifth place, their meeting with BetFred Cup finalists Motherwell on Saturday has an intriguing look to it. “Everyone has seen that the team has been playing well for a good few weeks but we’ve just not been getting the results,” he said. “That happens in football and I am just glad that we got one in the derby and hopefully we can now kick on. Motherwell are flying as well so it will be a tough game on Saturday but we will look forward to it. It is important now that we go on and pick up some wins.”

As pleasing as this was for the Leith outfit, Hearts fans were licking their wounds at the end of a match which sees them in the midst of an eight-match winless run against their city rivals. While they never did enough to win the match, a match like this could be the making for a 16-year-old like Harry Cochrane. John Souttar admitted Hearts were a team in transition under Craig Levein, unlike this settled Hibs team.

“I think it’s clear we are a team in transition,” Souttar said. “That’s not an excuse, but it’s tough playing every game away from home, especially when we are still developing as a team. Everyone has off days or games where they don’t perform. Every side in the world will have a time when they play one of their rivals and don’t play well. It’s not a week in, week out kind of thing. I think this was an off day for us.”

Next up for Hearts is the small matter of a Murrayfield showdown on Saturday against a Rangers side in considerable disarray and Souttar knows victory there would help put smiles back on supporters’ faces. “It’s a big week for us,” he said. “You look at the fixture list and we’re in the middle of three tough games. We’ve got to go there [Murrayfield] on Saturday and get something against Rangers. We have to go out and do ourselves justice.”