WELFARE STATE Craig was sucker punched in Juniors so won’t let Talbot floor Jambos

“Welcome to the Juniors…”

The punch to the side of the head came out of nowhere for a teenage Craig Levein, a warning shot he’d no choice but to heed.

Nearly 40 years on, the Hearts manager knows the lower tiers of the Scottish game have become a lot more sophisticated.

But he’s still not inclined to treat Auchinleck Talbot with any less respect than he did his first opponent for little Lochore Welfare back in 1980.

The Jambos are on a hiding to nothing as they take on the conquerors of Ayr United for a quarter- f inal place at Tynecastle, expected to walk over the top of the Ayrshire outfit from five levels below them.

The former Scotland boss is experienced enough to know a banana skin when he sees one, though, and he undertook a personal spying mission to watch them – and relive his youth.

He said: “I went to watch them at Petershill last week but I didn’t manage to stay incognito!

“There was a fair bit of banter, it was good fun actually. It’s a while since I’ve been at a junior game and it was interesting, having played juniors myself for the mighty Lochore Welfare when I was 16, before I signed for Cowdenbeath.

“It certainly made a man of me. I remember my first match and the big striker who was playing against me.

“The ball came up to him and he controlled it, but I put my leg between his legs, knocked the ball away, went round him, got it and passed it – the next minute, there was just this ‘ bang’!

“I was lying on the ground dazed from a punch to the side of my head, and he just says ‘ that’ll be the last time you do that!’.

“He was right, to be fair. The next time the ball came up, not surprisingly, he won it!

“The game has changed a lot now though. When I watched Auchinleck, you could see that they know what to do.

“You could see they’re used to winning. They have good players and they have some decent recent history and a number of them have been playing together for a while.”

It’s seven years since the only previous meeting between the two sides, a game Hearts scraped through thanks to an 84th-minute winner from Gordon Smith.

But it was far from one-way traffic and Talbot have done nothing but grow since, Tommy Sloan attracting plenty of talent from the senior ranks to their squad.

Levein said: “I had Gordon Pope at Dundee United as a young kid and he was the one who had the disallowed goal against Hearts in the 2012 game.

“The guy who scored their winner against Ayr, Craig McCracken, had been at Ayr himself, so there’s enough there for me to realise that we can’t go into it with anything less than full concentration.

“It’s a game that everybody expects us to win. The only people who don’t expect us to win will be the Auchinleck players, so we have to understand that their resistance will be the hardest thing to break down.

“If we can do that, then it’s just about football, and in that case I would be fairly confident.

“But they’ve been here before. Obviously I wasn’t here at that time but from what I have heard, it was a weakened Hearts side that was put out against them. I certainly won’t be doing that.

“There might be some changes from Wednesday night but I don’t see the need for wholesale changes at all. If you look at that Livingston team we played, on Wednesday for example, some of their guys played juniors, so it’s not outwith the realms of the imagination what they can do when you look at what they’ve done.

“So our quality will be the thing we need to bring. That will be critical.”

Auchinleck have taken out Wick Academy, Cove Rangers, Fraserburgh and Championship challengers Ayr en route to the last 16.

They’ve only suffered one defeat all season, all the way back in October, and have won 13 and drawn two of their 15 games since. Levein warned: “The thing with Auchinleck is that like most teams who are used to winning, they will be very hard to play against.

“It doesn’t matter what level they are used to winning at, it’s not easy to shake that mindset because they are used to finding ways to get through games.

“There will be a part of them that will be expecting to win.

“But I’ve done some homework, I will be watching more footage, and the players will know exactly what to expect by kick-off.”

Playing in the Juniors made a man of me