RYAN Clarke says a fourth successive clean sheet is the very minimum Oxford United want ahead of Morecambe’s visit tomorrow.

A 2-0 win at Accrington Stanley on Tuesday night was United’s third shut-out in a row and their goalkeeper has not conceded a goal from open play in almost six and a half hours of football.

Only Swindon Town and Torquay United have kept more than Clarke’s 15 clean sheets this season and the 29-year-old is in no mood to be generous to the visitors this weekend.

He said: “We’re setting ourselves really high standards at the moment.

“The minimum we want is a clean sheet and to get three on the bounce is really good – we’ll be looking to do that as a group again on Saturday.”

One of United’s clean sheets came in the reverse fixture, a goalless draw with the Shrimps in Lancashire last December.

It halted a losing streak of five games in all competitions and while not the most spectacular result of the campaign it could be seen as a turning point, with the U’s losing just twice in the 20 games since.

Clarke believes it was an important result in the context of the season, but does not underestimate Morecambe, who have seen their season fizzle out after a good start.

He said: “We didn’t have a very good November and we needed to stop the rot.

“We went to Morecambe and did that with a good 0-0 draw, they gave us a good tough game and I’m sure they’ll do the same at our place on Saturday because they were up at the top of the table at the start of the season.

“They’ll be disappointed to drop off since then, but will be looking to prove a point.

“Teams play a lot more freely when the pressure’s not on them, but we can’t worry about them, we’ll just focus on our jobs.”

One feature of the Accrington game was taking a two-goal lead into the closing stages.

Clarke admitted it made a welcome change after the U’s needed to hang on for results in previous games.

He said: “It’s not happened as often as we’d liked, but hopefully the boys realise how much of a breather it gives us when the second goal goes in, even though we didn’t take our foot off the pedal.

“Hopefully we can have a couple of more of them because there’ve been a lot of times where we should have been two or three in front this season, but it’s not happened.”