The cringey Hearts locker incident that summed up why bloated squads leads to chaos - Ryan Stevenson

Anyone wondering why Steven Naismith is talking about keeping Hearts’ summer transfer business tight needs to know one thing. Crammed dressing rooms can absolutely squeeze the life out of football squads.

I’ve been in one and let me tell you it was chaos. When I first signed for Hearts in the winter window of 2010 there were SIXTY-THREE players in the squad. Enough to fill three dressing rooms. We were split into first team regulars, the reserves and then the bomb squad. Those poor guys in the third category were so far out of things they never trained with us and were just told to go and run round the woods at Riccarton every day.

I was totally taken aback when I walked in and saw the number of players - I’d been used to less than a third of that at Ayr United. I kid you not, it was so bad that the kit man took me aside on that first day and got one of the foreign lads - David Witteveen - to empty his locker for me. I was stood there with my wash bag and boots having just arrived from Ayr and had to stand next to Witteveen while his name was peeled off the locker door and replaced with mine.

The poor guy then had to go and sit with the bomb squad who had no lockers and just hung their kit on pegs. Obviously he was raging. Straight away he hated me! I was cringing. I’d come from an Ayr dressing room with a third of the number of payers in it but where everyone was tight knit as a result.

But at Hearts at that stage it was bedlam. Almost impossible to remember everyone’s name. It can be a horrible place because boys will come in with an attitude and be moaning about the manager not playing them but others will think the boss is great and it can end up causing a real rift.

Before you know it the changing room separates