Clarke says it won’t get worse but he and his players have to prove that’s not patronising BULLS**T

HIS words were admirably defiant. Given the circumstances, what else could they be?

But the haunted look on Steve Clarke’s face gave the game away all the same.

That’s five games now he’s had to get to grips with Scotland’s slump and haul this team out of the death spiral which has ripped the heart out of this latest qualification campaign.

Clarke now gives off the impression of a man who is losing control of his own destiny.

For almost an hour on Thursday night he thought he was finally getting somewhere as his team resisted all manner of Russian advances in the bear pit of the Luzhniki Stadium – only to watch aghast from the sidelines as yet another spectacular capitulation brought him right back to square one.

The bottom line here is that the honeymoon period is over. The ocean of goodwill which greeted his appointment has evaporated amid the barrage of goals which have flown into David Marshall’s net ever since Scotland scraped an injury-time win over Cyprus in Clarke’s first game.

Battered from pillar to post by the Belgians and now routed in Russia, the manager is smart enough to realise the time for talking has stopped. Only action will now be acceptable and Clarke may well have made his way back from Moscow yesterday with serious reason to doubt if the players he thought he could rely on really are cut out for this level.

And perhaps even if he belongs here too.

He says he does. He’s adamant about it.

But Clarke knows the more this carnage piles up behind him the less his chance of making it out with his reputation alive.

“Only results can change that, only results,” Clarke muttered when asked why it is that the confidence drained from his players the moment they fell behind in Moscow the other night – 24 hours after he publicly urged them to win the last four matches of this wretched campaign.

“Listen, we need to give a nod to the level of teams we’ve just played against. I believe both Belgium and Russia will be involved in the later