Lawrence Shankland expressed his delight at his Scotland recall for the upcoming double-header against Greece and Denmark and says both he and Hearts are in a good place.
The number nine leads the Premiership goalscoring charts after the first round of fixtures and admits it’s important that Hearts enjoy their current run of form.
“It's good to be back involved” [with Scotland], he told the media at the pre-match press conference.
“It's been a wee while since I was back in the squad, which I've done a few times to be fair, but it's always great to be back involved in the national team and I'm looking forward to meeting up with the boys.
“Form helps and that's probably why you get selected for the national team. I've always found that I'm in good form or decent form and scoring goals. I've always had a shout at getting selected and that's the same again this time around. I'm in a good place, the club's in a good place, the team's in a good place as well.”
“I don't think anybody could really have anticipated the start that we've had. Obviously, you would love to start that way, but we’ve got a lot of wins in there for the first lot of games.
“It's really enjoyable at the minute and you need to enjoy it. I've said it a couple of times before, you need to enjoy these moments. Everybody's in a good place. The positivity around the squad and around the club at the moment is really good. You just need to roll with that and enjoy it.”
The Jambos welcome Dundee United to Tynecastle this Sunday, for what will be another sell-out in Gorgie and Shankland admits the home crowd can have a big influence on matches, as he sets his sights on the second round of fixtures.
“The stadium's been full for home games and there's been a lot of good moments and big games in there that have been enjoyable. It's always nice that the crowd have turned up the numbers to support us. I still feel we can get more from them and use more from them and get that energy for the stands on the pitch.
“Especially for the bigger games, you can feed off it and it feeds onto the pitch and it kind of galvanises the boys, you can feel it when you're playing. If we can get that, obviously we're on a good run at the minute. As I said, us players, we're enjoying it. I feel that can really push on in difficult moments and help us get results.
“I can assure you that we're not looking at how many matches we've played. We're enjoying this run we're on. There's a lot of difficult fixtures coming up again as we go round all the clubs again. We'll need to be on form and keep improving.
“That's what we need to look for. We've shown what we can do in the first block. There were a lot of difficult away games in there as well that we managed to get through and pick up a lot of points from.”
You can watch Lawrence’s press conference in full on Hearts TV.
