Zander Clark: Going one step further with Hearts and preparing for Euro 2024 with Scotland

The goalkeeper feels the next level is possible at Tynecastle Park

Zander Clark had a busy day at Celtic Park on Saturday. He will remain hard at work until the season ends, then comes the European Championship with Scotland. If selected, the Hearts goalkeeper will be occupied until late June, by which time pre-season training will have commenced at Riccarton. A proper rest will be difficult but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Celtic fired three goals past Clark at the weekend as Hearts lost out in Glasgow. He nonetheless produced several saves and did his international prospects no harm. “That’s pleasing, but I still went home disappointed because we lost the game,” he admitted. “Even when you do well, at the end of the day, it’s a defeat. So, the Euros and stuff is coming up and you want to try and find a good bit of form. I feel like I’ve done that, so I can only keep churning out performances at club level and see where it takes me.

“Ideally as a goalkeeper you want to be as quiet as you can possibly be, no matter what is coming up in the summer. The defence have been great all season, and if they get breached then it is up to me to try and keep the scoreline at nil. It wasn’t to be on Saturday, but when they did get through I had a few good saves, which was pleasing with the stuff coming up. Ideally though, you want to produce those sorts of performances and be on the side of the winning team.

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“I think in the first minute we had a chance. We started well, but lost a slack goal and that gets the crowd up and they feed off that energy. The first two goals are poor, we could stop them better, but we’ve got to look at the quality as well. After that, I think we got on the ball, we were brave in possession and we still created a few chances as well. When you go 2-0 down there so early on you can sort of crumble and disappear, but fair play to the boys, they dug in and we had a few chances. It just wasn’t to be.”

Defending has been one of Hearts’ strong points for much of the season. Witnessing Kyogo Furuhashi roaming freely to score Celtic’s first two goals was at odds with the norm for the visitors, who found themselves 2-0 down inside 21 minutes. “Yeah, that was frustrating. Obviously we knew they were going to come out and start fast and feed off the energy of the crowd,” said Clark.

“If we had managed to score in the first minute [through Lawrence Shankland] and quieten them a bit, it might have been better. We’ll watch it back and dissect what we can do better, but I thought the reaction afterwards to be brave on the ball, make passes and try to create chances – which I thought we did – was pleasing. We’ve beaten Celtic twice and they are a top team, but our aim is to try and keep closing that gap. We were brave on the ball, and that is something you need to be when you come up against either of the Old Firm, and I thought we did that well. For us, it’s a case of trying to dust ourselves down and moving on to the next game.”

“We’ve been very close to securing third, we’ve been in two semi-finals of the cups. Our next stage has got to be trying to go one step further, getting to the finals and lifting silverware, but that’s something we’ll look at over the close season, how we can achieve those sorts of goals. On the whole, though, it has been a positive season. We had a bit of a ropey start, so to come back and finish the way we have - we had a 12-game or 13-game unbeaten run, which was pretty special, so it’s been a good season.”

There is some wonder in and around Gorgie that Hearts head coach Steven Naismith was not one of the nominees for PFA Scotland Manager of the Year. Clark had no problem extolling his gaffer’s credentials when asked about it.

“The manager has done brilliant since he has come in. When we started off results weren’t going our way and there was a lot of noise, but we believed in the manager and what he could do when the new players settled in. When we went on that sort of 13-game, 14-game run, we were well-drilled and we did everything that the manager had asked. He would probably say that he shouldn’t be up for that as people in football always do, but it’s something you’d need to ask him.”