Lawrence Shankland scored twice as Hearts cruised to a 3-0 Scottish Premiership win at home to Motherwell.

The Scotland striker, who is out of contract in the summer, stuck either sideof half-time to set the hosts on their way to a routine victory at Tynecastle.

Alan Forrest rounded off the scoring in the 62nd minute as Hearts moved above their opponents in the table.

Shankland has found goals much harder to come by this season than in his previous two campaigns with the Edinburgh club, which yielded 24 league goals each, but he opened the scoring after half-an-hour.

The 29-year-old ran on to a long ball which the Motherwell defence should have cut out, checked back inside and fired low into the corner.

The visitors thought they were level in the 38th minute when Callum Slattery volleyed home following a set-piece, but the effort was disallowed for offside following a lengthy VAR review.

Instead Shankland doubled the hosts’ lead on the hour mark, getting his head on to a James Penrice cross in and guiding the ball down into the corner.

And Forrest killed the contest with Hearts’ third just two minutes later, blasting home the rebound from close range after Yan Dhanda had brought a good save out of goalkeeper Aston Oxborough.

What the managers said…

Hearts interim manager Liam Fox: “I’ll repeat what I said last week, if you put Lawrence Shankland in these types of positions and you do work on how you’re going to get the ball to him, he will score goals.

“That’s evident and obvious from his spell here but also previously in his career.

“But not just everything’s about Lawrence, there’s got to be people that make passes for him and run ahead of the ball for him. So it’s a team effort and I think they deserve huge credit over the last couple of weeks for how they’ve performed and the goals they’ve scored but also how hard they had to work without the ball today as well.”

Motherwell boss Michael Wimmer: “My only thing is what I always say, and I say this also in Austria and Germany, if the VAR says something then in my opinion it should be a clear mistake.

“If VAR takes five minutes and the referee takes five minutes again at the monitor, then for me it could not be a clear decision. So this is the only thing I want to say.

“So please let the referee take responsibility and say goal or no goal and you should be brave enough.

“Each guy makes mistakes and no worries, then it was a mistake, but if you need 10 minutes to make a decision I think it’s a long time.”

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