Robbie Neilson hopes the sight of a huge travelling support can inspire Hearts to more Edinburgh derby glory against Hibernian at Easter Road on Tuesday.
The Tynecastle side are unbeaten in their last four visits to Leith and have won three of them. With in-form Hearts third in the cinch Premiership, Neilson would love to see the 3800 away fans treated to another memorable occasion at the home of their team’s bitter rivals.
“It’s massive that we can take that size of support there,” said the Hearts manager. “There aren’t many games nowadays where we can take the full allocation.
“When we go to Rangers and Celtic now, we just have slithers of fans so it’s very pleasing that we still get the full away end at Easter Road and hopefully we can put on a performance for them.”
Neilson is relishing the trip across the city.
“It’s always a good time to play a derby,” he said. “If you’re on a good run, like we are, it gives you a chance to escalate it; if you’re not, it gives you a chance to kick-start things. If we perform well, we think we can get a result.
“The players will be ready for it, they’re looking forward to it. We’ve got a number of guys who haven’t experienced it before. It will hopefully be an entertaining night.
“We’re going into it in decent form but a lot of the time that doesn’t matter. It’s about how you start the game, so we have to be ready for it.
“We’ve got a decent record down there recently but we have to go and perform. We can’t go down there with any half-measures.”
Hearts have won each of their last seven matches against sides outside the Old Firm, but Neilson will not be satisfied until they are also regularly picking up results against Scotland’s big two.
“We’re doing alright but we’d like to beat Rangers and Celtic as well,” he said. “We don’t want to have the mindset that we’re happy to beat all the other teams but we’re also happy to get beat off the Old Firm.
“We want to win those games as well. We’ve had close games against them and performed well but the next step for us is to build a team with the mentality to beat the Old Firm.”
