Kettlewell hoping Motherwell can take belief from League Cup win over Killie

Motherwell manager Stuart Kettlewell is hoping his side can take belief from last week’s win over Kilmarnock as they prepare to host Hearts on Sunday.

The Steelmen booked a place in the League Cup quarter-finals, where they will play Dundee United, with a 1-0 home victory over the Ayrshire club.

And while Kettlewell says the cup will now be put on the back-burner as they return to Premiership action, he is keen for his squad to take confidence from the result.

Speaking on Friday he said: “After the game last week I spoke about us not getting carried away with ourselves, we hit the brief which was to get into the next round of the cup, we have a difficult tie in the next round against Dundee United at home, but that’s very much on the back-burner for us at this moment in time.

“But I did say that I wanted it to be that blank canvas and start to breed a wee bit of confidence.

“There’s been plenty of upheaval when you start to look at everything that’s happened, a lot of new faces but a lot of injuries, and now it’s just a case of finding a bit of settlement.

“I like consistency in how you work, who you work with and how you prepare for games and I’m just hoping last week gives us a bit of confidence and a bit of belief to make this a really difficult place to play here at Fir Park, because every club wants to build that home record.

“You just want to build that bit of belief and hopefully the win last week starts to put that foundation in place.”

For the third week in a row Motherwell will be playing a team coming off the back of a European result, following a game against Rangers and the win over Killie.

This weekend’s opponents Hearts, who have yet to win a game this season, will be aiming to bounce back from Thursday night’s 1-0 defeat to Czech side Viktoria Plzen.

Despite the result Kettlewell was impressed by what he saw from Steven Naismith’s men and is expecting another tough game on Sunday.

He said: “I think by in large it was a really good away performance from Hearts against a really good side and they were almost there in terms of getting it back to Tynecastle next week on level terms, and I think they will take a lot of confidence from that performance.

“How that affects our preparation is hard to say, they have a really strong squad. For example, Blair Spittal was arguably our best player last season and he’s sitting on their bench so that shows you the strength in depth they have.

“Where it becomes a wee bit difficult is how we want to prepare, what we want to show the players, there’s been a late night and a quick turnaround for video analysis, and we had our first video analysis today as we wanted to have a look at happened last night.”