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Craig Gordon recorded his first league clean sheet since his long injury lay-off in Heart of Midlothian's 3-0 win over Dundee on Saturday. It took the team to 16 Premiership shutouts for the season with Zander Clark between the sticks for 15 of those.
It is the joint second-highest top-flight total for the club in 30 years, equalling the number during the 2005/06 season. The weekend's result saw the team surpass the 15 recorded in 1999/00 and 2017/18. The latter, under Craig Levein, saw the team keep seven clean sheets in a row.
Hearts now have two games, away to St Mirren on Wednesday and Rangers at home on Saturday, to move onto 18 clean sheets in a single season and go past the 17 recorded in 2015/16 when Robbie Neilson led the team to third after winning promotion from the Championship.
It would be the highest number of shutouts since the Scottish top-flight was a 44-game campaign. In the 1993/94 season Hearts reached 18 while two years earlier the team recorded 20 on the way to finishing second in the league.
The victory on Saturday took Hearts onto 66 points, the highest total since the team split the Old Firm to finish second in 2005/06. Steven Naismith has set the target of picking up at least four points from the final two fixtures to reach 70 points. That would be the second-highest total in the club's history (reminder: it wasn't until 1994/95 that three points were awarded for a win).
"Really good, that is a good measure of us," Naismith said when asked about the total. "Yes we’ve had a good season but if you focus on us and how we go about winning games it’s a good marker, but I want to get to 70. It’s a realistic goal, it’s something we can do. It shows the drive the squad’s got that we put on the performance we did today to get the three points."
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