Abdallah Sima’s goal was the difference at Tynecastle and Clement was delighted with hard work and character shown by his squad to see out the match and ensure the three points in the Scottish Premiership.
Speaking to RangersTV at full-time, he said: “It is a hard place to come, you need to be tough in the duels and you need to be organised and we were in most of the moments.
“I saw a good hard-working team with a good mentality from the players starting and from players coming in. I see a big change in mentality from two months ago. Two months ago, it was impossible to win games like that but now they are growing in that way, but we need to finish off games like tonight.
“We had five really good big chances, so we need to score at least three goals and that is a working point to be cooler and to be more clinical in those situations because if you score the second goal the game is finished, and Hearts lose the belief, so we have things to work on.”
The manager praised the players for taking on board the work in training as it paid off in the build-up to Sima’s goal in Edinburgh. He continued: “The other positive point is if you only have one training session before the game because the games come so fast after each other and you train on one thing and you score like that it is a good thing that all the players did the right things in that situation.
“It is crucial for the confidence of the players, and they have grown on the ball in the last couple of weeks. You can see it in the number of chances we create every game but still we have quite some work to do. We also had moments that we were too sloppy and too easy losing balls with the qualities we have so we will work on that.
“The downside of this game also is that Tom Lawrence had to come off and it is not what we expected because he felt fresh after the last game so we need to make a good assessment. I am not happy that every week or every several weeks we lose some players and other players need to come in out of injury, it is a very difficult puzzle at the moment in that way.”
Clement believes it was a different test for the team to see out the final period at Tynecastle with just the one-goal advantage. He added: “For sure, it is very important to be compact, to be robust, to be strong in the duals and to be collective and that is what everybody did, including the guys who came in.
“You can see that there is a good team mentality now and I told them after the game that this needs to be a reference for the whole season. We cannot be sloppy with the mentality, it has to be top and then all the other things will follow with hard work and good training after this very busy period because for the moment it is game by game and we cannot do so much in between.”