David Gray says he is responsible for Hibernian’s recent disappointments

David Gray admitted he must take ownership of Hibernian’s latest setback at the hands of city rivals Hearts but the embattled manager remains adamant his side are set for a strong season if they can become more clinical in front of goal.

The Hibees boss has come under fire from sections of the support after suffering a 3-1 defeat at home to the Jambos a week after an agonising 3-2 loss to Gent in the Conference League play-offs.

Gray accepted the first-half display in Thursday’s derby was nowhere near good enough, and said he was “extremely disappointed, angry and hurt” as the Hibees went down to a third consecutive derby defeat for the first time since 2012, albeit he cited Jack Iredale’s “needless” second-half red card as a mitigating factor.

“During this period now, you need to own it, you need to take it to the chin and I certainly need to own it, it’s my responsibility when you lose any game,” he said.

While Gray has qualified for Europe in each of his first two seasons in charge, some supporters feel early-season defeats by Malisheva, Motherwell, Gent and now Hearts indicate he is not equipped to take them to the next level.

“If you look back at every game we’ve lost this season, we certainly could have won every one of them if we’d taken our chances again,” said Gray, whose side visit St Johnstone on Sunday.

“Even looking at the Hearts game in isolation, very fine margins again. So as poor as I thought we were first half, some of that was down to Hearts settling better but we were still in it.

“We scored the next one and I thought we dominated the game from that point. I do think there was very little in it. We created enough chances. We’ve already shown that domestically we’re capable of big performances.

“Consistency needs to come within that but the level of performance wasn’t really poor across the piece against Hearts. We still did enough. If we had kept 11 players on the pitch, that would have certainly helped.

“I thought the ascendancy was certainly with us, so there’s a lot of things that we know we’re doing right. We’re creating more than enough chances to win games of football but we’re certainly not taking enough of them, that would be the big thing.

“I’ve said that too many times now. But you need to keep creating the chances, you need to keep putting yourself in those positions and it’s my job to make sure we keep giving the players the confidence to be able to do that.”