St Mirren manager Stephen Robinson is fully aware of how important a European tie is to the club’s fans and hopes to ‘buck the trend’ of how Scottish clubs have been performing in continental competitions recently.

The Paisley side will face either Valur of Iceland or Albanian side Vllaznia in the Europa Conference League second qualifying round, with those two clubs meeting in their first-leg on Thursday 11 July.

Robinson told Sportsound: “We’ve had more time to prep, we don’t know who we’re playing yet [in Europe] so I’m making the trip next Thursday to go watch the first leg of the game in Iceland so we can get a little bit of a picture about both teams we could play and, obviously, do our due diligence on them and be as prepared as we possibly can.

“The incentive is there for us, we’ve waited a long, long time to get here.

“I think people were praying that we didn’t get teams from Northern Ireland or Southern Ireland because they wanted a European feel to it and we’ve got that, it’s fantastic.

“There’s been a lot of hard work from everyone at the football club to get us to this stage. It was a dream really two and half years ago to be a top-six side and follow that up with European football so now we’re here we can’t rest on our laurels.

“There’s a lot of work to do, a lot of things in the background to keep building the football cub and keep making it a sustainable top-six club.

“This gives us a chance, the money involved in European football is huge.

“In recent years teams in Scotland maybe haven’t progressed as we’d have liked so we’d certainly like to buck the trend and show how good a team we are.”