By Barry Anderson
Yan Dhanda flew home early from Hearts鈥 Spanish training camp after the birth of his child, whilst the club are awaiting news on Jamie McCart鈥檚 injury. Players and coaches travelled back to Edinburgh this morning after a week-long stay at La Finca resort and manager Derek McInnes was pleased with the efforts of all involved. Two games took place during the pre-season trip, a 1-1 draw with Scottish Premiership counterparts St Mirren on Wednesday and a 3-1 victory over English League Two side Crawley Town on Friday. Midfielder Dhanda did not take part in either fixture after leaving camp early to attend to family matters. Centre-back McCart was injured in the first game and has had a scan to determine the full extent of his injury after being put on crutches. Of the 28-man squad who travelled, only Dhanda, Lewis Neilson and reserve goalkeeper Harry Stone did not get any game time. McInnes is shaping his team for next week鈥檚 Premier Sports Cup opening tie against Dunfermline and played a 4-4-2 system in both Spanish friendlies. He felt the Iberian stay was a success overall, but is also demanding more in terms of energy and pressing. Hearts forced Crawley into several errors with a much-improved hustling approach following the St Mirren encounter. Their first two goals stemmed from players winning the ball back high up the field and McInnes was pleased with that tactic. However, he wants it to improve further for competitive action. 鈥淎fter the first game, we’d spoken to the players and we mentioned it again on Friday,鈥 he stated. 鈥淎ll managers will say the results aren’t important [in pre-season], but you still want to follow your effort at the end of the day try and win the game. We wanted clean sheets for the two games. We wanted no injuries. We wanted a couple of wins. We didn’t quite get everything with Jamie’s injury. He got scanned on Friday and we’ll get results on Saturday, hopefully. 鈥淚 thought there was a wee bit more of what I would like from us on Friday. I thought there was more responsibility to make forward runs, more responsibility to pass forward. And then you still get your moments to control the game a wee bit on the back of that. I thought we pressed well. We knew Crawley were a team who liked to bring you on to them. They’re a team that want to try and dominate through possession. And at times we were happy. 鈥淚 thought we got the press far better in the second half. I thought we still had some good moments first half but I would like us to be a bit more aggressive on the press. I thought our effort to press was good but we never turned the ball over in dangerous areas – or good areas for us – as much as we should have. Again, these wee things need to become a bit more natural if we’re going to go after teams who want to take us on. 鈥淚 want things to become a bit more natural for us when our first thought is to try and play forward as much as we can. I thought both right full-backs, [Christian] Borchgrevink and [Adam] Forrester, have tried to take that on and [Harry] Milne and [Stephen] Kingsley as well. We tried to get our strikers on the last line against them, so we tried as often as we could get either [Blair] Spittal, [Sanders] Kartum, [Alexandros] Kyziridis, [James] Forrest and our two strikers, whoever they were at any time. We tried to cause a bit of stress for their back line rather than making it a comfortable day. And I think we got a bit of that. 鈥淚 was far happier with that type of performance. I think we looked a wee bit sharper than we were the other night. I think we’ve had the benefit, clearly, of the warm-weather training and the warm weather in the matches. I think 45 minutes there would probably equate to about 65-70 minutes in normal conditions. So we’re two games in, considering we were only two weeks back, we’re alright. We’re looking fine and I still think there’s loads of improvement. But we’ll get there, I’m pretty sure of it.鈥 READ MORE: Double Hearts transfer on the cards