12 hours ago
CALUM CROWE: We've reached the point of no return under Steve Clarke ... qualifying for the World Cup is now no more than a pipe dream
There was always a danger it would come to this. A danger that Steve Clarke's time as Scotland manager would turn bitter due to the feelings of anger and resentment that have festered among the Tartan Army.
As the man who finally led our nation back to a major tournament, not once but twice, Clarke should be remembered fondly. Since taking charge in 2019, he has, by and large, been good for Scotland.
He has presided over some terrific results and given the fans some brilliant memories along the way. But it's plain for all to see that his time is up. He's finished as manager.
There is no real joy or celebration to be found in that assertion. It's just a painful reality and a reflection of how the national team have unravelled over the past year.
Scotland will start their bid to reach the next World Cup very shortly, with the qualifiers starting in September. But there is no genuine prospect of Clarke taking this team to the finals in America.
Instead, with a new campaign now only round the corner, Scotland are in the death throes of his reign. He looks like a busted flush and we are about to see another World Cup dream go down the drain.
It is a bizarre state of affairs. With SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell and president Mike Mulraney seemingly in awe of Clarke, we are handcuffed to a manager who is patently no longer up to the job.
Before Euro 2024 got under way last summer, Mulraney gave an interview in which he described Clarke as the 'perfect Scottish manager'.
Just a fortnight later, after a pitiful showing across the three matches had seen Scotland eliminated at the group stage, few supporters would have shared that sentiment.
For the second tournament in succession, Scotland stunk the place out. Clarke had shown a lack of ambition as manager and was tactically out of his depth.
That was the time for him to go. A mutual parting of the ways at that stage would have seen most Scotland fans happy to shake his hand and thank him for all the good times, despite what happened in Germany.
Instead, he was allowed to carry on. After disappearing from public view for a few months after the Euros, he eventually popped up again and started telling us how he was '75 per cent' sure he will leave after the World Cup campaign.
That's not his decision to make. Or at least it shouldn't be. Not if he worked in an organisation with genuine accountability and an appetite for progression. The whole episode was embarrassing.
Rekindling bad memories of how things panned out under Gordon Strachan, we were given the patronising impression that Clarke was somehow doing everyone a favour by remaining in charge.
The 3-1 home defeat to Iceland last Friday night felt like a new low in the relationship between Clarke and the fans, with boos ringing out at full-time.
It's perhaps just as well that Hampden was barely half-full, owing to the fact that tickets were priced as high as £40 — yes, forty quid — for an end-of-season friendly against a team ranked 74th in the world.
The SFA tried a package deal to price the game in with the three home World Cup qualifiers later this year, but it didn't really work. To try and charge punters £40 to watch a friendly against Iceland was a nonsense.
But that's by the by. In terms of on-field matters, it was inevitable that the headlines would focus on the calamitous performance of young goalkeeper Cieran Slicker on his debut.
A young keeper who is third-choice for Ipswich Town should be nowhere near a Scotland squad, regardless of injuries to other players.
His nightmare ended up taking the focus away from the fact that, once again, Scotland's general performance was utterly dreadful.
Clarke only dodged the spotlight due to Slicker's misfortune. He got away with it, when, in reality, he had been every bit as culpable for the defeat as the 22-year-old.
'We had a bad night,' said Clarke afterwards. That was putting it mildly. Friendly or not, the performance was woeful against an Iceland side who had lost 3-1 to Kosovo and 4-1 to Wales over recent months.
The fear is that the rot has now set in under Clarke. You can take it all the way back to when Scotland lost 1-0 at home to Northern Ireland in March last year. That was the night when alarm bells really started ringing.
Scotland had lost momentum building up to the Euros and, barring the odd flicker in the Nations League, haven't really recovered it for any great length of time.
They looked like they had turned a corner when a 0-0 draw with Portugal was followed by wins over Croatia, Poland and then Greece in the first leg of the play-off.
But the way Clarke's side capitulated in the return at Hampden, losing 3-0 against a Greek side they will face in the World Cup qualifiers, was seriously worrying.
Nothing they offered against Iceland did anything to dispel the feeling that Clarke has run his race as manager.
Scotland now have players operating at the top level across Europe. A lot of them play under top managers for their clubs.
Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour have just won Serie A under Antonio Conte. Andy Robertson has gone from Jurgen Klopp to Arne Slot and a Premier League title at Liverpool.
John McGinn plays under one of the most tactically-astute managers in Europe in Unai Emery at Aston Villa. Lewis Ferguson has won a Coppa Italia as captain of Vincenzo Italiano's dynamic and exciting Bologna side.
Then they report for Scotland duty and fall under the command of Clarke, a manager whose tactics are inherently negative, unambitious and unsophisticated.
His approach was fine when he was first appointed national boss, which saw him trying to steady the ship and dig the nation out of a hole.
But our squad has evolved since then. Our players are better and are capable of playing a more attacking, possession-based style where they press opponents high up the pitch.
They all do it with their clubs. Yet Clarke chooses to deploy them in a completely different fashion for Scotland, with Friday seeing him revert to the old system with five at the back.
That formation was essentially created years ago to get Kieran Tierney and Andy Robertson into the same team. We should have moved beyond that now. Our squad is in a different place.
We have guys like Lewis Ferguson and Ben Doak crying out for selection, two players who would make a difference in midfield and the final third. When Doak is fit again, he should be one of the first names on the team-sheet.
Neither Robertson nor Tierney have shown the form to warrant being an automatic pick. Robertson looks like he could be replaced at Liverpool this summer, while Tierney's move back to Celtic from Arsenal is based more on romanticism than ambition.
We should be past this constant clamouring to get them both in the team. The reality is that Scotland's squad has evolved and improved to the point where only one of them needs to play at left-back.
The talent we have available further up the pitch outweighs the need to shoehorn Robertson and Tierney into the same team. That system is now to the detriment of the talent elsewhere in the squad.
All in all, Scotland have four wins from their last 21 games. There have been 12 defeats in that time, 22 goals scored and 42 against.
They will surely improve those numbers on Monday night against a Liechtenstein team who currently sit 205th in the world rankings. For context, this is a team who lost 3-1 to San Marino just a few months ago.
Anything other than a Scotland win — and by a margin of a few goals — is unthinkable. Even that wouldn't do much to dispel the feeling that things have reached the point of no return under Clarke.
Things have gone stale, the manager has been allowed to stay on too long, and the fans are rapidly losing faith. Any notion of Scotland being at the World Cup next year feels like a pipe dream.
