Nick Montgomery declined to blame Dylan Levitt for the error that allowed Craig Levein’s St Johnstone to score the game’s only goal at McDiarmid Park. And the Hibs manager conceded his squad simply weren’t good enough, particularly in the final third, to get a result on another difficult away day.
Monty claimed after seeing Levitt’s attempted pass out from a short goal kick go straight to Saints scorer Graham Carey: “I don’t need to speak to Dylan.” It was an error; everyone makes mistakes. It was an honest error.
“Dylan has been absolutely fantastic for me, an exceptional footballer, but he occasionally slips or simply does not catch the ball correctly.” What’s upsetting is that when we handed the ball away, we didn’t respond quickly enough to cover and recover.
“But credit to them, it’s a good strike, right in the corner, so it’s a difficult one for David Marshall. So there’s no blame on anyone, it’s a genuine mistake. But that’s fine.
“There are a lot of mistakes in football. They made a lot of mistakes in the first half today and we didn’t capitalise. Credit to them for capitalising on the one mistake. We didn’t put away the chances we had, didn’t create enough chances.
“That pitch was tough at times, people slipping over and missing the ball, but we didn’t deserve to win the game. Did we deserve to lose it? On reflection of the whole game, probably not. But we did, we lost the game, and at 1-0, you know they are going to fight for everything.
“What we didn’t have going forward was enough to create a real threat, which played into their hands.” It’s difficult to break down a squad when there’s no urgency in the front third.
“It felt like we weren’t going to score today, which was the most disappointing thing because we had a lot of attacking flair with the players we had on the pitch.” They were quite offensive even with the changes I made. We just needed a little imagination – and we got caught by surprise.”
Montgomery, who stated he brought Lewis Miller out before halftime because he was feeling poorly and already had a booking, was delighted that VAR intervened to overturn a late red card that would have ruled Dylan Vente out of the Edinburgh derby, saying: “I think it would have been harsh. He genuinely just went to flick the ball around the corner and the guy ducked his head. Common sense prevailed and fair play to the referee for having a look, because there was no intent from Dylan to kick him in the head.
“Lewis was sick. He was coughing and spluttering at half-time. And he was on a yellow card, feeling out of breath.
“I could leave him on and hope he gets sent off, as he did at Dundee.” So I wasn’t going to chance it while he wasn’t feeling good. That was the motivation.”
Saints manager Craig Levein believes former Scotland custodian David Marshall was the only thing that kept Hibs from a bigger loss, adding, “We scored one, but Marsh made four top, top saves.” “I thought we created a lot of opportunities.”
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