MORTON defender Markus Fjortoft believes the perfect tonic to Friday night’s penalty shootout heartbreak at the hands of Motherwell will be securing the club's Championship future.

The Norwegian central defender believes that the shootout defeat will spur him and his team-mates on to go and finish the season on a high after coming so close to a Scottish Cup quarter-final tie against Hibernian.

Fjortoft has put the disappointment of Friday's cup defeat behind him to turn his attentions to Championship survival.

He believes that Ton should go into tonight’s game against Hearts with no fear as they look to put distance between themselves, David Hopkin’s Ayr United side and Arbroath.

He told the Tele: “Playing with performances like the one we produced on Friday gives us confidence and it will drive us on as well.

“Like I’ve said before it's important we use that performance and then the agony of the penalty shootout to go and finish the season on a high.

“It’s three massive games for us, massive is an understatement but we know what we need to do.

“When we come up against Hearts tonight we know that if we can perform like we did against Motherwell then we can be confident that we’ll take something from them.

“Especially when you’re so close like we were, it looked like it was written in the stars after we scored that late on in the game but that’s not the way it has gone unfortunately.

“We’ve had five penalty shootouts this season now and we’ve only won one of them.

“So maybe it's not meant to be for us in them this season.

“We thought we’d managed to get the monkey off of our backs in that sense after beating Dunfermline the last time around.

“Aidan [McAdams] is a great match winner for us and to be fair to Motherwell, they hit pretty much five perfect penalties.

“Sean [McGinty] has stood up and has been leading the club the full season with his penalties and by setting example.”

Fjortoft believes that the defensive resilience shown on Friday night will stand Ton in good stead going into the run-in.

He added: “At any level in Scotland really, you need to be solid defensively and I think we were on Friday night.

“We rode our luck at times and sometimes you need that but if you have that in place then we can give ourself a fighting chance like we did we did.

“We came this far and we’d have loved to have gone through and played in the quarter-final but that’s just how football is.

“Now we just turn our focus on the league, we finish the season strongly to try and keep the club in the division."

GUS MacPherson could be without Kalvin Orsi who picked up a bad head knock on Friday night during extra-time.

Cameron Salkeld is still out of the picture despite being fully fit.

Aidan Nesbitt is expected to be fit despite coming off injured on Friday night.