MANAGER TARGETS A CAREER PINNACLE

CRAIG LEVEIN is targeting a career highlight when he returns to Hampden on May 25.

The 54-year-old will seek to stamp his CV with a major trophy win for the first time in his playing or managerial career. He came agonisingly close when Dundee United lost a penalty shoot-out 3-2 to Rangers in the 2008 League Cup final, following a 2-2 draw. Levein joked yesterday that he was well accustomed to being jeered at Hampden in response to a question about the half-time heckles from Hearts fans that greeted a scoreless first period.

By full-time, his players were lapping up the cheers and Levein admits he will take great pleasure from leading a Hearts team out in the season-ending showpiece.

‘It’s a very proud moment for me and it will be even prouder when the cup final comes round,’ said Levein. ‘I’ve done a lot of things in football but to come back and win a cup with Hearts would be the best thing.’ Levein confessed that his players felt the nerves of being overwhelming favourites. A calming conference at the interval in the Hearts dressing room ensured that the negative response from fans didn’t have an effect.

‘They can boo me,’ he stated. ‘Listen, I’ve been booed once or twice before, especially here.

‘We had a lot of players who hadn’t been here before in these circumstances. Bobby Burns and Aidan Keena started and it’s a big occasion for them, I needed the supporters to be behind the players more than anything else.

‘But it’s always reciprocal, isn’t it? We need to do something to create atmosphere and, once we scored the first goal, the nervousness of the supporters disappeared, the same as it did with some of the players.

‘They are all in their own little worlds on the field, dealing with what’s inside their own heads. We had more pressure on us than Inverness, of course.

‘Then at half-time, you have an opportunity to talk about a number of different things. But just having a calmness in possession that would allow us to have better opportunities to score helped.’

Levein was delighted to see Jake Mulraney play a major role in tormenting his former club before an enforced withdrawal. He believes an influential big-stage performance can help with the winger’s confidence issues. ‘Jake has been showing in glimpses how devastating he can be when he gets on the ball and attacks on the front foot, but he hasn’t really put together a performance like the one he put on here,’ noted Levein. ‘We took him off with a sore shoulder eventually but until that point, there was a consistency to his play that enabled us to find him and get dangerous situations from what he was doing.

‘He’s not blessed with the most confidence, so I think this will help him enormously.

‘I was really chuffed with him.’