Scotland fans can fret – but they need to keep perspective too

By [Staff Writer]

GLASGOW – A pocket of the Tartan Army has traded kilts for catcalls, booing Steve Clarke and his players after back-to-back 1-0 friendly defeats to Japan at Hampden and Ivory Coast in Liverpool. The jeers are loud enough to jolt the squad, yet small enough to feel like a sideshow in a week when bigger nations were dumped out of the World Cup picture altogether.

Denmark and Italy, European heavyweights both, will watch next summer’s tournament on television after penalty-shock exits. Scotland, for all the angst, are already inked into the draw. That alone should frame the conversation, even if the soundscape around the camp has turned sour.

Clarke sent out a much-changed side against Ivory Coast and saw a performance that was neither limp nor listless. The stats sheet – 14 shots to 12, four on target to three – hints at a team that pressed, probed and occasionally panicked a defence that had sailed through qualifying without conceding. Nicolas Pepe’s decisive counter, born when Billy Gilmour and Kieran Tierney switched off and Liam Kelly froze, was the difference. It was a lapse, not a collapse.

Up front, George Hirst channelled every ounce of endeavour into the lone-striker role, out-working Lyndon Dykes’ usual shift yet still searching for the cutting edge that neither man has consistently provided. The numbers say the answer may lie elsewhere: Oli McBurnie has 13 goals and seven assists for high-flying Hull in the Championship, but the 27-year-old hasn’t pulled on a Scotland jersey in five years and appears no closer to a recall. Ross Stewart and Kieron Bowie have drifted out of the frame, and Calvin Miller or Elliot Watt remain speculative long-shots for the final 26-man squad bound for the United States.

Clarke, a manager who trusts continuity, is unlikely to spring a bolt-from-the-blue selection now. Lennon Miller, the teenage midfielder many hoped to see, never left the bench during the double-header and seems ticketed for a developmental role at best.

What the manager does need is a return to the formula that toppled Denmark on that feverish Hampden night: searing tempo, diagonal rain from Andy Robertson and Ben Gannon-Doak, and the late-zone thunder of Scott McTominay and John McGinn. The goals that night carried a whiff of the miraculous – McTominay’s overhead, Tierney’s rocket, Kenny McLean’s lob, even Lawrence Shankland’s poacher’s finish – but the blueprint is grounded in hard-running chaos, not stardust.

Gannon-Doak, still regaining peak sharpness, is pivotal to that plan. If he, McTominay, McGinn and Ryan Christie hit their ceiling, the centre-forward question becomes less existential. None of Clarke’s current No 9 options are Harry Kane; the star power is distributed deeper and wider.

Perspective, then, is the operative word. Two scoreless friendlies do not constitute a crisis; they constitute a calibration. The boos may echo, but they do not rewrite the fact that Scotland have qualified for a World Cup and retain the tools to rattle better-credentialed opponents when the stakes are real.

Fret, worry, chew fingernails over what happens in America – that is the prerogative of every supporter who has waited two generations for this stage. Just remember: the alternative soundtrack is the silence already enveloping Copenhagen and Rome.

Scotland are in the tournament. They have a puncher’s chance. And they still have time to land the first blow.