Craig Levein has challenged his Hearts players to take more responsibility in front of goal after their fifth game without scoring.

Hearts have been struggling since the loss of forwards Steven Naismith and Uche Ikpeazu through injury and Saturday's 2-0 reverse against St Mirren in Paisley was their third consecutive defeat.

As a result, they have slipped to third in the Ladbrokes Premiership behind Rangers, who are due to visit Tynecastle next Sunday.

Levein said: "What I don't want to do is to get into a situation where we're waiting for players to come back. There's loads of points to be played for between now and, in particular, Steven and Uche coming back. We'll have to find a way of trying to pick up three points against Rangers.

"The problem is scoring goals. I can change the system as often as I like, if we're not putting quality into the box and not putting the ball into the back of the net it makes it difficult.

"Sometimes I look and think they're all waiting on somebody else doing it. I think we have to take individual responsibility and deal with their own particular thing well.

"If it's a cross, just do the cross properly, and if it's the finishing part, then make sure you hit the target. If the goalkeeper saves it, then fine. I'm getting fed up talking about this unfortunately but that's where we are just now."

St Mirren have had their own problems in front of goal this season but those were forgotten on Saturday when Adam Hammill found the net twice – his first effort being an incredible strike from 45 yards.

But manager Oran Kearney was not hugely surprised the former Barnsley winger was able to score such a spectacular goal – and hopes it's the start of run of goalscoring form that will continue against Hamilton next weekend.

He said: "When I did my research on him the very first thing that came up on YouTube was a clip of him in the play-off at Wembley and he scored a belter from 30 or 35 yards right into the top corner. From that point of view he does have that in the locker and he does have that something special.

"I think there's so much more to come from him. We got him and he wasn't carrying any weight but he missed quite a bit of pre-season and quite a bit of football.

"We intended playing him for 60 or 70 minutes against Aberdeen then we had a whole two weeks until the next game when we were going to try to get a mini pre-season into him.

"He hurt his shoulder that day and was unable to train for three or four weeks so it set him back a huge amount.

"It's only probably been this week where we've started to see flashes, the legs have started to come and he's started to look more like those videos or what I would have wanted or expected.

"I would say that's only the start for Adam, provided we can keep working him hard off the pitch and get him up to a level we would like."