CRAIG Gordon is doing his level best to give the stereotype of the thrifty Scot modern day relevance. The Celtic goalkeeper took his place in the SFA roll of honour with his 50th cap against Slovakia on Thursday night and it was fitting that he should enter this hall of fame by keeping his backdoor firmly shut. The clean sheet which he and his entirely left-sided backline achieved against Marek Hamsik and company meant it was the first time since 1999 where a Scotland side had managed to keep the ball out of their net in three consecutive competitive matches.

Should that statistic become four-in-a-row in Ljubljana tomorrow, then you can go back a couple of years further still for a parallel. That was 1997, and the peak of the Craig Brown era, when Andy Goram and then Jim Leighton kept clean sheets for a stretch of seven Scotland matches in a row, a run which took us form the end of the Euro ’96 finals to the guts of our successful World Cup 1998 qualifying campaign.

Little wonder then if Gordon should regard Thursday night at Hampden as one of the finest moments of an international career which begun way back in April 2004 with a 4-1 win against Trinidad and Tobago at Easter Road. And not just because racking up that half century of caps was the kind of feat which most assumed was beyond him as he vainly attempted to rehabilitate after a number of serious knee injuries.

“That’s three clean sheets in a row for the first time since 1999, so that’s massive from my point of view,” the 34-year-old said. “It’s definitely one of my sweetest moments for Scotland. It’s right up there. There was obviously Paris as well. There’s been some great highs – and hopefully there’s another one to come in Slovenia.

“We’ve been good at defending in the last few games and that’s a good place to start from to try and win any game,” he added. “We limited them to few opportunities so it was a good performance from the defence to set the team up to go and try and win the game. It took us until the last minute to find a way past their keeper, who was fantastic, so it was nice to finally get the ball behind him. I’ll need to look it up to see when the last time we kept four clean sheets in a row was now!”

Gordon has seen too much in his career – both on and off the field – to start getting ahead of himself. There was that near miss with the controversial 2-1 defeat to Italy at Hampden in November 2007, a campaign where Scotland overcame France twice. “I was involved when we played Italy and we didn’t manage to do it, so I know what that feels like and I’d rather not feel that again,” said Gordon, whose one mis-step in a fairly quiet encounter came when Robert Mak used his close proximity to dive to the ground and earn a second yellow card. “We’ve got it in our own hands but we’re away from home and they [Slovakia] are a good team. It took us until very late in the game to beat them at Hampden. We know we’ll have to play really well - probably better than we did against Slovakia on Thursday.”

Slovenia, it should be said, has been a fairly happy hunting ground for Gordon. Scotland were rebuilding under Walter Smith after the Berti Vogts era when he kept goal in a 3-0 win in an otherwise meaningless match in Celje, while he graced the Stozice Stadium in a friendly against Olympia Ljubljana which was one of Brendan Rodgers’ first matches in charge of Celtic. The Slovenians are missing two of their more established players in the form of suspended Italian-based duo Rene Krhin and Valter Birsa but they have graced major tournaments in more recent memory than Scotland and Gordon’s opposite number, Jan Oblak of Atletico Madrid, is one of the most highly-rated goalkeepers in the world.

“We knew it was going to be difficult, and it’s still going to be difficult,” said Gordon. “We still need to go to Slovenia and win, and even if we do that, we’ll have a double-header against another team that’s finished second in their group.

“So it’s still a fair distance away,” he added. “There’s still a lot of work to do. But we’ve kept it going to the last game and given ourselves a great chance, which is what we needed to do. The atmosphere is great in the squad at the moment. To win a game the way we did against Slovakia is always going to help us bounce into the next game with an uplifting feeling.”

Even the fact that the board went up with four minutes of additional time to be added onto the game wasn’t enough to spook this Scotland defence. “I think we coped better with them sending the big guys up at the end,” said Gordon. We knew we’d had to head some balls away in the last few minutes. I had big Chris Martin back in front of me heading one away at the end. We dealt with that really well and didn’t give them any chances late in the game.”

Instead that one fateful late opening came at the other end. “It’s a sign of good fitness that we keep going,” he said. “We said at half-time they might tire towards the end after playing for so long with ten men. We knew we’d probably have a chance to get on top in the last ten or 15 minutes and try and win the game from there, and that’s how it turned out.”

There were further plaudits for Charlie Mulgrew - currently stationed in League One with Blackburn Rovers - and Hearts captain Christophe Berra. “I enjoy playing with Christophe – he’s a top player,” said Mulgrew, “and hopefully he enjoys playing beside me. But you can go through the whole squad and find guys who have made a contribution. Going three games without conceding a goal for the first time since 1999 says a lot about the whole team. We can’t do it alone as a defence. It’s about the guys ahead of us working hard and making life easy for the boys at the back. We all work hard to make each other’s job easier.”