With Celtic toiling, Rangers building momentum, and a favourable run of fixtures this month, this felt like a must-win game for Hearts.<\/p>\n
In the first period they played like a team who believe they can be champions as they bossed their struggling opponents off the pitch.<\/p>\n
New signing Altena created three chances, including a brilliant ball in for Halkett to head in his sixth goal of the season, and looked promising going forward.<\/p>\n
Fit-again midfielder Beni Baningime strolled the opening 45 minutes as Cammy Devlin put in another towering performance, and Lawrence Shankland floated about causing mayhem.<\/p>\n
The Scotland striker laid on six opportunities overall, the most he has created in a league game for two-and-a-half years.<\/p>\n
All of that should have resulted in a comfortable half-time scoreline, but instead Livingston took confidence from still being in the game.<\/p>\n
They went direct in the second half as Mohamed Sylla started to get into the game, and Yengi was outstanding as he busied himself in the final third.<\/p>\n
The striker had three efforts in good positions saved by Schwolow, the best of them after turning inside Stuart Findlay in the box.<\/p>\n
At the end Hearts had to stand up to a strong challenge and a nervousness in their own stadium as McInnes brought on more defenders to see out an important win.<\/p>\n
All that matters is they got it and now have a six point advantage at the league summit again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Celtic toiling, Rangers building momentum, and a favourable run of fixtures this month, this felt like a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-389611","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}