Craig Halkett’s first-half red card proved costly for William Hill Premiership leaders Hearts as they went down 1-0 away to St Mirren following a late header from Miguel Freckleton.<\/p>\n
The centre-back was dismissed in the 29th minute for denying Saints’ debutant Jacob Devaney a goalscoring opportunity.<\/p>\n
It was the third time in five league games the Jambos had been reduced to 10 men. Unlike the previous two occasions, however, they were unable to grind out a result in Paisley as Freckleton\u2019s 88th-minute header consigned them to a third defeat of the season.<\/p>\n
The result leaves Hearts six points ahead of Celtic and Rangers, both of whom play their games in hand on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Hearts suffered a huge blow in the 29th minute when they were reduced to 10 men. Stuart Findlay got caught dithering on the ball by Mikael Mandron, forcing fellow centre-back Halkett into some frantic last-ditch defending that resulted in him fouling Devaney just outside the box and being sent off.<\/p>\n
Devaney, an on-loan Manchester United midfielder who has five caps for the Republic of Ireland U21s and was one of two Irish players in the St Mirren line-up alongside Killian Phillips.<\/p>\n
From the resulting free-kick, Phillips’ effort was superbly saved by Schwolow, with Mandron unable to force in the rebound.<\/p>\n
There was more frustration for the hosts just before half-time when they were awarded a penalty after Harry Milne fouled Jayden Richardson on the right edge of the box, but VAR deemed the offence was outside the box. John fizzed the resulting free-kick agonisingly beyond the far post.<\/p>\n
Saints continued to knock on the door early in the second half and Schwolow produced a spectacular save to deny Mandron.<\/p>\n
But Hearts started to become a threat on the counter-attack, with Claudio Braga in particular carrying the fight to the Saints defence.<\/p>\n
It felt like the game could go either way in the closing stages, and Saints eventually made the breakthrough when Freckleton headed home John’s corner from close range.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Craig Halkett’s first-half red card proved costly for William Hill Premiership leaders Hearts as they went down 1-0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-279895","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}