Steven Naismith speaks on Hearts chasing Rangers, the next stage at Tynecastle, St Johnstone and Connor Smith

Nobody in Gorgie will be allowed any unrealistic expectations

For all the praise and acclaim bestowed upon Hearts lately, Steven Naismith remains the most grounded man in Edinburgh. It will take far more than garnering 34 league points from the last 42 available and holding a 12-point advantage in third place for the Tynecastle head coach to get carried away. If, indeed, he ever gets carried away.

Saturday's win at Dundee took Hearts closer to second-placed Rangers in the Premiership table than fourth-placed Kilmarnock. They travel to Perth to face St Johnstone on Wednesday evening seeking to increase their unbeaten run to 10 matches. The pre-season aim was to finish third, but perhaps there is a temptation to glance upwards towards the Ibrox club above? Not for Naismith. He is adamant there is no prospect of Hearts looking at second spot just now.

"You don't [look up]. Come April or May time, if you’re lucky and you manage to continue that progression, then you hope," he said. "And you probably hope the dynamic of the situation and where the pressure sits gives you a bit of a hand. But you don’t, we need to be realistic. Longer term, our goal is always to deal with what the next step is, and that is consistently being in Europe and consistently pushing to be in those places at the end of the season.

"But that’s hard. It’s easy saying it, but it’s hard, as every club in Scotland shows in Europe, the Old Firm included. They’ve got more experience and they manage to be at the end of the season challenging. For the rest of us, we need to get more teams in the group stages, and it needs to be continuous to gain experience. Until you’re at that point, there’s no point in looking beyond that. We’re realistic. We’re driven and we want to do as well as we can, but we are never really looking that far ahead."

Finishing third consistently is the focus. Hearts secured third spot in season 2021/22 after gaining promotion back to the Premiership the previous year. Last season they came fourth. Third is currently theirs to throw away but their ambition is to nail down that position year-on-year.

"Yes, and then hopefully creating a bigger gap below you and you're consistently becoming a third-placed team," added Naismith. "So, even if you have a bad spell, you can consistently be in and around that. That’s progression. As with everything, you build a club that's challenging for everything.

"I said at one point this season I was looking forward to two away games coming up because it would tell us a lot about the character of the players after doing a lot of work. We then came through that spell and at the start of next season we’ll look back at this season and go: 'This bit wasn’t good enough, we need to learn from that and we need to get better.'

"That’s the way it’ll be and that’s the way we work every day - from what we do in and out of possession and what we do at goal kicks and what we do at set-plays. It’s constantly just reviewing it and getting better and making better choices. On the bigger scale and taking about getting into Europe, it’s about being third and challenging. It’s all the same stuff. You don’t set out and say: 'There’s the goal there, let’s go.' It's the small steps you have to focus on."

Naismith and his assistants, Frankie McAvoy and Gordon Forrest, are just eight months into their jobs as Hearts' permanent managerial team. Others have needed significantly longer to make progress. Naismith, again, is taking nothing for granted on that front. He knows managers need patience from directors and chairmen but seldom get it.

"You do need time, but you’re in an industry now where that’s hard to get," he admitted. "I’m fortunate - and it’s partly why I’ve been at the club for so long as a player and as a coach - because I know the people involved with the club and what their goal is. I know what they want and how ambitious they want to be.

"The hardest part is the first part. The players are all starting from blank and they don’t know what I think is good and what I want. It’s about constantly making mistakes to go: 'No, that’s not what we’re doing, it’s this.' As you can see now, I think in most games there’s an idea of how we’re going to play, where our players are going to be and the positions they’re going to be in to try to win games.

"The first part was the defence, getting it solid. Last season, even when I was in charge, we conceded far too many goals, and cheap goals at that. We knew that was an issue and you have to sort that, because if you don’t then you’re struggling. As we’ve gone on we’re playing better stuff, we’re more threatening, we’ve got more control. So, come next summer, we don’t go back to the start. It’s about adding the next layer and the next layer and the next layer that makes us even better and more consistent."

Which begs the question: What is the next layer at the moment? "Going forward, the more the games go on and the more we play teams, they are showing us more respect and sitting deeper," explained Naismith. "The hardest thing in a game is when you are up against a low block and you have to break them down. We’re inconsistent with that. At times we do it and at other times we don’t.

"We need that to become the norm and know how to deal with it. That’s probably the next step. If we’re successful and we get into Europe, it’s about dealing with that challenge, from the summer to Christmas, and being able to do both. That’s asking a lot of the players, it’s asking a lot of the young players and it’s asking a lot of us recruitment-wise to get it right. You need all of those things to be near enough perfect going into a European campaign to give you a chance of competing in every game."

First and foremost, there are Premiership matches to win to secure a European adventure. St Johnstone at McDiarmid Park pits Naismith against the manager to signed him as a player for Hearts, Craig Levein. Hearts won both previous meetings between the clubs this season without conceding a goal.

“They’ve done a decent bit of work in January in terms of recruitment, so it’ll be different," said Naismith. "They’ve changed quite a few times in the systems they play, and actually the way they’ve played in games recently. That comes down to there being more of an opportunity in some games and they think they have to have more of a go.

“Against us, it might be different. We’ve got an idea of how they’ll play. In the bigger picture, we need to get away from totally changing. It needs to be just small details we’re changing from game to game, and that’s no different in this game. We know they’ll have some threats and who and what we need to do to stop that - and then how we’re going to cause them problems."

One of St Johnstone's new recruits is the former Hearts midfielder Connor Smith. Now 22, he waited several seasons for a sustained run at Tynecastle which didn't come. He moved to Perth at the end of last month looking to ignite his career.

"Connor goes into the game and he's rubbing his hands because it's an opportunity, but I had a brilliant relationship with Connor," Naismith stated. "Him moving says more about him personally. For us, we could have said: 'Connor, stay here.' It's not helping Connor. Yes, it might be good for him to say he is a Hearts player but he needs to go somewhere he has not come through as a youth player, he's a first-team player and he's got real quality.

"I think he will kick right on now and that was the kind of chats we had. As hard as it can be sometimes to leave the club you have come through and you have a good association with, he'll look back in three, four, five years' time and go: 'That was the best thing I did, for sure.' We need to know that he is one of their threats because we know how good he is. I know personally because I worked with him a lot over the last few years."