Heart of Midlothian technical director Steven Naismith believes his side got what they deserved as they fell to a 1-0 defeat to Dundee.
Luke McCowan scored the only goal of the game with Naismith describing Hearts' first-half performance as "very passive, slow and safe".
"We weren't good enough today," he said. "It's as simple as that. I don't think we deserved much out of the game. We are fortunate at half-time to be 0-0, we never really caused them many problems and they caused us more problems. That's a reflection of the first half. We need to make three changes which did make an impact. For 15-20 minutes we caused them loads of problems but I felt we went away from what was getting us good situations.
"We are a club that wants to be in Europe consistently and I think we have a squad which can deal with that. Today didn't go our way but we need to learn from it and understand that, if you want to be in Europe, there is a mentality where you need to keep going and going and going all the time. You can't be safe when teams are going to set up to counter you or ask you to push bodies forward. We need to be better in possession than we were today."
He added: "We were powder puff towards the end and that's never going to get you anything".
READ MORE: Dundee 1 - 0 Hearts: Admin error, Dens defence, Boyce importance
Naismith, who confirmed the club are waiting to hear from a specialist regarding the severity of Barrie McKay's injury, reckons Aidan Denholm will "learn" from his part in the concession of the goal noted the lack of communication with the set-up of the free-kick prior to McCowan's finish.
Meanwhile, Dundee boss Tony Docherty cleared up confusion surrounding his starting line-up. McCowan was named in the starting XI before a new team sheet arrived with Josh Mulligan in his place. However, it was confirmed McCowan would in fact start, turning in a match-winning performance.
“There was something happened before the game," Docherty explained. "Human error you put it down to. But it just shows the strength of the squad because it was similar to the Motherwell game where we had Antonio Portales go off injured really early. We had to re-jig it there.
"It doesn’t surprise me with Luke. At the time I’m telling him to pass but I remembered he’d done it before. He’s a good player and typifies the type of player we have here.
“I’m really pleased for him but more for the squad because they got their rewards for all their hard work.”
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