'A return to Scotland's worst of times under Clarke'

BBC News

23-03-2025

With 17 minutes left to play at Hampden, Greece manager Ivan Jovanovic added insult to Scottish injury when calling ashore two of his best players, the duo who had done more than anybody else to put his team into an unassailable lead.The game was long done by then; 3-0 going on more. Scotland had been as wretched as Greece had been classy. Part of Hampden was exasperated, part of it was angry, another part was on its way home, fed up.Giannis Konstantelias had scored Greece's first and assisted the second. No need to exert him any more, not when there was not a scintilla of a threat of a comeback from Scotland.Konstantinos Karetsas, the teenage sensation, had scored that brilliant second goal. He came off, too. Job done. Another mortifying reflection of Greece's dominance.
Scotland didn't have a whole load of composure from the start, but at a painfully early stage they lost the bit they had. Lewis Ferguson clothes-lined an opponent and got a yellow card. George Hirst went yapping to the referee and he got booked as well.As the savage reality of their own inadequacies was hitting them right between the eyes, Kieran Tierney had possession 20 yards into the Greek half. In front of him, a barren landscape. No movement, no options. He turned and booted it back to Craig Gordon and Hampden let him have it.Boos rang around the national stadium and it was fair enough. A few moments later, Grant Hanley played an agricultural hoof down the park, the ball careering out of play with no Scotsman in sight. Cue another visceral response from the home fans.Shortly after that Gordon knocked a clearance straight to Greek substitute Giorgos Masouras. Slapstick stuff. "Embarrassing" as John McGinn described the performance, later on. And it was. Embarrassing and unsettling.
'The rudest of rude awakenings'
Ryan Christie expressed his frustration, "especially with how well the first leg went". We could revisit that now. The bottom line of Athens last Thursday was, indeed, amazing, but there were warning signs.Scotland won the game through a penalty they should never have got and a defensive display that was always going to be hard to repeat.Jovanovic learned a lot about how to attack this Scotland team. They tore them apart with their speed of thought and speed of movement, the accuracy in their passing and the ruthlessness in their finishing.We could go on and on in highlighting Scotland's failings. We could document their shocking lack of accuracy and their dismal habit of affording Greece all the time and space they needed to build their lead, but it would take too long.What you were left with at the end was a feeling of despondency at how poor Scotland actually were. If there was hope, and belief, that this type of performance was maybe behind them, then this was the rudest of rude awakenings.It was a return to the worst of times under Steve Clarke - the World Cup exit to Ukraine, the horrible loss in Dublin that followed it, the soul-destroyer against Hungary in Germany. It was only one bad day amid a recent upturn, yes, but it felt worse than that.Seeing practically all of Scotland's go-to men fail was quite something. Just when you had trust in them again after three excellent victories in a row, they go and do this.
'Greece do psychological number on Scotland'
Clarke has shown a fantastic capacity to recover from setbacks and there's reason to believe in his ability to do the same again now, but there was a weariness at Hampden. "It was a kick up the backside," said McGinn. But why was it needed?There were more boos at full-time but a fair number of supporters had vanished by then. It would be too dramatic to say their optimism of making the World Cup also disappeared, but the fact is Greece are in Scotland's group and they have now done a proper psychological number on Scotland before those games in the autumn. Clarke said as much in the aftermath.He has some months to ponder things now, a window in which to consider his next move. He suggested he regretted not changing his team a little more from Thursday to Sunday. He spoke about freshness, or lack of it. "I'll go away and look at myself," he said.What might he be thinking about? The safe return of Ben Doak to add width and pace, for sure. The desperately needed reintroduction of Aaron Hickey after his awful injury woes, without question.Clarke is deeply loyal to the players who have delivered for him, but Scott McKenna is playing in La Liga every week. The composition of his midfield, too. Kenny McLean has been a tremendous servant but the time has surely come for Ferguson to take over.Relegation to League B is, in itself, no great disaster. Scotland will win more games down there. They'll have a better chance of grabbing a play-off place in the next Euros while operating in less rarefied air.The thing that made Sunday stunning was the complete disintegration of a team we thought had more about them. That was the takeaway. Clarke has been here before, but the hope was he would never be back here again.