Hearts striker Steven MacLean brushed off his tussle with Celtic midfielder Eboue Kouassi as a “laugh”.
Kouassi went down in apparent agony holding the front of his shorts and accused MacLean of grabbing him after the pair clashed at a corner during Celtic’s 3-0 Betfred Cup semi-final win. The Celtic player went off moments later but had been limping prior to the incident.
But Steven MacLean said: “It was just a laugh, just a coming together. If I went down every time a centre-half niggled me I would be on my backside all day. It was just handbags.”
The 36-year-old striker was on a yellow card at the time of the incident and referee Willie Collum spoke to the pair afterwards, but the Hearts player felt he had been hard done by after being booked for an aerial challenge on Mikael Lustig, who went down clutching his head.
“It was never a booking,” MacLean said. “You could see it on the screen. I think everybody in the stadium saw it. To be fair, me and Willie get on well, it was just unfortunate. He said if it wasn’t a booking then he apologised, which is fair enough.”
MacLean lost strike partner Steven Naismith to injury inside eight minutes and grew increasingly isolated in the second half as Celtic took control.
“It was obviously disappointing for Naisy himself and us as a team, but we dealt with it first half,” the former St Johnstone player said. “Our shape was good and they never really troubled us.
“But second half, once they got the goal, we never really recovered. We kind of lost our shape a bit. We were trying to have a go and got caught in between. Some of us were trying to push up and some of us were sitting off.
“We have got to learn from that. We have still got a lot of big games coming up so we have got to push on from there.
“It’s probably a lot of boys’ first semi-final. They have got to learn from it and hopefully we can get to more as a club and learn from this disappointment and push on.”
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