BERRA IS PUSHING FOR EARLY RECALL AS HEARTS AIM TO HALT WINLESS RUN

CRAIG LEVEIN has challenged his Hearts players to run the legs off weary Euro adventurers Rangers at Tynecastle tomorrow. Steven Gerrard’s men played with ten men for virtually the entire second half of Thursday night’s Europa League draw with Villarreal, following a second sending-off of the season for Daniel Candeias. Hearts boss Levein was at Ibrox for the match — and draws an obvious conclusion about where his team can punish tomorrow’s visitors in Gorgie. ‘To play more than half the match with ten men, it’s a good result — but that effort takes it out of players,’ he said. ‘And, for that to count in our favour on Sunday, we need to keep the pace of the match as high as possible for as long as possible. ‘If we don’t do that then we’re giving them time to recover during the match, which we don’t want to do. ‘Our team is fit, so we need to keep up that tempo throughout. ‘I can’t say that’s absolutely going to make the difference but, logically, after Rangers have played such a highpressure match, if we can make it about stamina and running, then hopefully we can get something from the match.’ Levein saw potential for Hearts, without a win or even a goal in their last five matches, to get at Rangers during his scouting trip to Govan — despite still being without leading scorer Steven Naismith through injury. ‘It was a kind of weird game,’ he said. ‘I thought Rangers were vulnerable before the sending off and Allan McGregor had two or three fantastic saves. ‘They actually looked more solid after the red card but that sometimes happens because the focus becomes more on defending and everyone does a little bit more to cover the extra man. ‘We don’t have the firepower that we had. ‘Sometimes for everything to work properly it needs lots of different pieces to fit together — and just now we’ve not got the right pieces to do what we’ve been doing earlier in the season. ‘Play has been more bitty, less pleasing on the eye and we’re not creating as many chances as we did previously. ‘But the frustrating thing for me is that can’t be the situation where we just say: “Ah well, we’re not scoring goals…”

‘We have to find a way to score goals, whether that’s getting better at set-pieces or relying on the midfield players rather than just strikers to contribute. ‘We maybe put pressure on the wide players to cut in and score more goals. ‘All of these things have to be taken into account. ‘It’s going to be frantic, it usually is, and you know what it’s like at Tynecastle when the stadium is full. ‘OK, we lost against Kilmarnock there but our record at home has been pretty good, including a win over Celtic. ‘So while people can look at it and say this is a tough game, it’s actually the kind of game I’d like to have coming up after the result last week. ‘It changes the way players will be thinking about the game.’