Jack Ross has challenged Hibernian winger Martin Boyle to maintain his scintillating start to the season by shining in Sunday’s Edinburgh derby.

The 28-year-old Australia international has already netted eight goals for club and country this term and has scored in each of his first four cinch Premiership matches.

This helped him land the league’s August player of the month award on Friday and manager Ross is hopeful that Boyle can help give Hibs the edge, as he did with a decisive double as the Easter Road side won 2-0 in the last derby at Tynecastle in December 2019.

Ross said: “Martin’s a match-winner for us. He’s shown that consistently in my time here. You need those type of players in your squad and we’re fortunate to have more than one of them.

“He’s delivered for us regularly already this season and he’ll want to continue that scoring run that he’s on of scoring in every league game – and he’s more than capable of doing that. He scored away on international duty last week. He loves that type of (derby) atmosphere and he’s looking forward to it.”

Hibs and Hearts are joint top of the Premiership ahead of the first Edinburgh derby to be played in front of supporters since March 2020.

Ross said: “It’s fantastic that the return of fans to the derby has coincided with both teams being at the top of the league because it’ll make it a terrific day on Sunday.

“We’re obviously only focused on what we do and where we finish but we recognise the importance of having strong teams in the capital city and the responsibility upon us as clubs to do that. We’ve both started the right way in terms of doing that.

“People have said that this is on paper the most challenging and competitive Scottish Premiership for a number of years because of the size of the clubs in the league so we’ll face this type of fixture, up against good teams, a lot this season.

“A derby match is always a tough fixture anyway. We’re against a team that have started the season just as well as us and they’re competing to try and stay top of the table come the end of the weekend.

“Hearts have proved they’re a good team by how they’ve started the league campaign and how many points they’ve accumulated over the four matches.

“You don’t do that without being a good side, but so are we with the points return. For us the focus is on the continuation of things we’ve done well for a long time now.

“We’ve had a good start to the season. We wanted to carry last season’s positivity into this season and we’ve done that in the main.

“We would like to have been absolutely perfect in the league and to have gone further in Europe but a lot of our performances have been good, our points return to date and the position we find ourselves in the league is obviously encouraging.”