Hearts season comes down to Hampden after top six shocker and I have one Aberdeen fear - Ryan Stevenson

When Hearts players walk out and see half of Hampden bathed in maroon for the Scottish Cup semi final on Saturday they absolutely better get it.

Get what it means to represent Hearts. Understand that the DNA of the club demands you give everything you’ve got for the jersey. Because last weekend’s goalless draw at Motherwell was as far removed from everything that club stands for as I could ever have imagined.

Nobody escapes blame. Not Neil Critchley because the tactics were rubbish. Not the players because the performance was spineless. Not the board because this season should have been so much better.

It should never have come down to the last game to make the top six but it did and Hearts should have gone to Motherwell with machine guns blazing.

This is Heart of Midlothian. No disrespect to Motherwell but to stand off them and put in such a meak 90 minutes was utterly unacceptable.

Then I have to put up with endless screenshots of Tam McManus’ column in the Record lording it over Hearts with HIbs sitting third and calling me, Gary Locke and basically every Jambo on the planet out.

I’ll take my medicine on that one. I don’t take it very well. But I showed it to Lockey on Tuesday morning and he was absolutely seething. His reply? Something along the lines of ‘how many derbies did that wee (fill in the blank) win?”

Lockey is exactly what Hearts need on the park. He’d never accept such a substandard performance as what was produced at Fir Park.

He was manager when we got to the League Cup Final at Hampden in 2013. We lost the game to St Mirren. It was an awful feeling. But you know what? More than 20,000 Hearts fans gave us a standing ovation at the end because we absolutely emptied the tank for them.

We were a team