On Saturday, Heart of Midlothian achieved something for the first time in the club's history when they defeated Livingston 4-2.

The come-from-behind victory over the West Lothian outfit at Tynecastle Park secured at least a fourth-place finish in the Scottish Premiership. With that comes confirmation the team will be playing European football next season.

It is the first time Hearts will play European football in three consecutive seasons. Ever.

This season's fixtures in the UEFA Conference League qualifiers was the fifth time the club had appeared in European competition in back-to-back seasons but they had never managed three. Until now.

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As well as the strong and consistent league performance across the past three seasons, the feat also points to a lack of consistency across the last 60 years.

Since 1960 the club finished in the top four of the top flight in three successive seasons just once prior to these past three campaigns. That was the mid-to-late 1990s when two fourth-place finishes were followed by a third place and Scottish Cup triumph in 1998.

With an 11-point advantage over Kilmarnock and just 15 points left to play for the aim is to now secure third place. Should Aberdeen lose to Celtic in the Scottish Cup semi-final this weekend it would mean third place enters the Europa League play-off round and is therefore guaranteed group-stage football next season.

"Yeah, but that's not the one we are looking for - we are looking for third place," Craig Gordon said when asked about securing European football. "It's all eyes on that. We maintained the gap and that was the most important thing. to maintain the gap going into the split. Now we can go and attack that and get over the line in that too."

Meanwhile, the win over Livingston was Steven Naismith's 50th in charge of Hearts since taking interim charge towards the end of last season. He has led the team to success in 27 of those games for a 54 per cent win ratio. 

Of Hearts managers to have taken charge of at least 50 games, it is the second-highest win percentage since Tommy Walker's trophy-laden spell. Only Robbie Neilson in his first spell as boss has a higher win percentage than Naismith.