Motherwell manager Graham Alexander backed his players to be adaptable after ruling Jordan Roberts out for the season ahead of their Scottish Cup quarter-final with Hibernian.

Roberts scored one and set up the other as Motherwell won 2-0 on their previous visit to Easter Road but a knee injury has prematurely ended his loan spell from Hearts.

The man who set up Roberts’ goal, Tony Watt, is also out along with fellow forwards Harry Smith and Sherwin Seedorf, so Alexander may have to tweak his tactics as he bids to guide his team into the semi-finals.

On the previous win over Hibs, Alexander said: “It’s all about feeling good about yourself, and we felt good about ourselves after that game because we went to an extremely hard venue against a very good team and won there for the first time in a lot of attempts and years.

“It does build confidence, but we always balance that out with what won us the game there doesn’t win us the game tomorrow. There will be different players playing. Tony Watt and Jordan Roberts played that day and we haven’t got them at the moment.

“Jordan won’t be back for us, his injury has taken him out for the foreseeable. I don’t know the full extent of his injury, it isn’t a major one but he is certainly going to miss the rest of the season unfortunately.

“I am really gutted for the lad because he is a brilliant man, he did an exceptional job for us in his short period here and we are going to miss him because he’s a top guy.”

Amid the shortage of forwards, Alexander switched from a 4-3-3 formation to a 3-5-2 for Wednesday’s Lanarkshire derby victory.

“We have to change the team, we have to find different ways of winning,” he said. “We changed the other day to beat Hamilton and we have to look at what we do to win this particular game.

“We had to look at our previous results against Hamilton, we have let ourselves down against teams below us and took heavy slaps and couldn’t afford that to happen again. We had a couple of players missing and felt we had to do something different to win that game, which we did.

“The players adapted to it really well in a short period of time because we didn’t work on it too much, but I trust my players. I trust them to be intelligent enough to understand what we want from them. We keep it quite simple and clear for them and they took it on board and won the game.

“Saturday will be the same, we have to look at how we can beat Hibs and if we have to change something we will. Players have to be adaptable because you might change the shape after half an hour or at half-time.

“What we have found in the last couple of months is different ways to win games of football and that’s a great skill to have as a group of players.

“We have been on a really good run, we have had to fight really hard. We haven’t played as well as we would have liked in some games but we have got the result and football is about winning.”