Liam Henderson hopes to have a better Scottish Cup semi-final experience with Falkirk this time around

Liam Henderson’s last Scottish Cup semi-final appearance wasn’t one to remember.

The Falkirk ace found himself trundling off the national stadium turf, 76 minutes gone, having been substituted for Ola Lawal with his team 3-0 down in front of a sub-15,000 crowd. Inverness Caley Thistle were worthy victors that day - and the Hampden hangover that followed was gruesome. A win at Peterhead followed to round off a frustrating league campaign, with Dunfermline easing to the title. But the promotion play-offs then arrived, and a 7-2 aggregate defeat to Airdrie had Falkirk fans thinking that they’d be in the third tier forever.

It’s fair to say a lot has changed in three years... and Henderson is buzzing to have the chance to put things right this time around against the Pars.

He said ahead of Saturday’s semi-final tie: “We were in a completely different situation than we’re in now, league status, players that we had, no disrespect to those players, but the whole club I think we’re all just on a better trajectory, we’re in a more positive place. We weren’t doing so great in the league that season. It’s a whole different scenario in terms of where we are as a club and as a team, we’re in a much better place. It was the first time we’d used VAR. There’s another thing, we never used VAR before, now we’re a Premiership team, we use VAR every week. So there are wee things that we’re in a much better place.

“It’s going to be fast action, first ten, fifteen minutes, it’s going to be high intensity, it’s going to be balls in channels, it’s going to be second balls, it’s going to be everything you can imagine a derby is going to be happening in the semi-final in the first ten minutes. And it’s about coming on top in those moments and changing the game.

“Well, we obviously had the first League One season where they dominated us in terms of derbies and then we flipped that in the Championship. We’ve not obviously come up against them again since the Championship, so it’ll just be about all these things, the preparation that we’ve done and then applying ourselves on the game day.”

The Bairns coming into Saturday’s game on the back of a 6-3 defeat to Rangers at home in the Scottish Premiership, but Henderson says that loss was swiftly “parked” by boss John McGlynn.

“It was a one-off, it was a thing that’s never happened before, really, this season or last,” he said. “We’ve parked it, we’ve put it to bed, it’s done, the water’s been spilt, it’s over, we need to get on with it. It’s one of those things on Monday morning, we came in and we had a little chat. Normally we go through a lot of stuff but the gaffer was very cute in the way he did it. We never really looked back and got too deep into what we were doing wrong. Obviously we had to work on stuff and talk through a few things but it was parked very quickly in terms of we’ve got this game coming up, it’s at the forefront of our minds, it’s what we need to focus on. So we had a discussion, we went over it, not as much as normally, but we definitely went over it, we’ve parked it now and we’ve got full focus on Saturday.”