Tony Docherty has admitted goal hero Luke McCowan only started after he was wrongly included on the Dundee team lines. It ended up being a masterstroke as the midfielder’s second half goal was enough to sink Hearts and hand the Dark Blues their first top-flight win on their Premiership return.
Dundee had initially put out a team sheet that had McCowan in it and then realised it should have been Josh Mulligan. Referee Alan Muir refused to let them change it because it wasn’t an injury.
Docherty revealed: “There was something happened before the game. 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. That’s what I’m trying to build here so that regardless of anything that crops up we can deal with it.” Hearts technical director Stevie Naismith insisted it was the officials and not Hearts who had stopped Dundee making the pre-match change.