TALKING SCOTLAND
NO sooner had Jonas Eriksson blown the final whistle in the Stozice Stadium on Sunday evening to bring an end to a Russia 2018 qualifying campaign that had promised so much for Scotland only to ultimately end in disappointment and failure once again and the post mortems had started.
Why, furious fans demanded, had Matt Phillips stayed on the park in Ljubljana for the full 90 minutes when he had contributed so little?
Why, for that matter, had he even kept his place in the team after an anonymous display against Slovakia at Hampden on the Thursday evening?
Why was James Forrest, who had performed so brightly out wide for the national team in their penultimate Group F fixture, left out of the starting line-up?
And why y wasn’t he broughtg on when his side fell behind?
Why was Callum McGregor, who has been performing consistently well for Celtic, including in the Champions League group stages, for some considerable time now, given a chance with his country, even as a substitute, which his club form clearly deserves?
The unwillingness of Strachan to start Leigh Griffiths – the player who was, more than any other, responsible for the resurgence which Scotland have enjoyed in their section this year – in the first four games against Malta, Lithuania, Slovakia and England was also brought up once again.
Strachan certainly shared in the acute sense of frustration felt by both his players and sup-porters as a dismal run of underachievement run which now stretches back 19 long years continued. But regrets? He doesn’t have any. He remains adamant he couldn’t have asked for or expected any more from the group of players he has at his disposal.
“No, there is too much there for that, you can’t do that,” he said. “Say I did do something different. Does that guarantee a win? Whatever everyone else says doesn’t really matter.
“I respect it, but you can’t say if you had done something else, that would have been a winning team. It might have been worse, it might have been a lot worse.
“It is a pleasure working with these guys, it really is. It’s an honour.
“I have been lucky to work with great lads and have managed great lads, but these ones went deep in the last couple of games, to places where I don’t think they have been before.
“They pushed themselves to the absolute limit physically and mentally. Yes, we got 14 points out of our last 18. But it wasn’t just getting 14 points, it was how we did it. You can get 14 points luckily. I don’t think you can ever point the finger at us. Whatever we got, we earned.
“You can look back at a couple of things. A 94th minute equaliser for England. There could be a lot of things that would have made a difference, but it is a real pride that we take.”
The 60-year-old reiterated his long-held belief that the physical shortcomings of Scotland’s players make their efforts at international level difficult. He said: “All you can do is analyse and look at where you could be stronger. What you can’t do is change the genetics of the country.
“I don’t think that’s legal. I go back to it again, in the last campaign we were the second smallest squad after Spain. So we have to put more into any other game physically than others.
“We had to change the team against Slovenia because the dynamics of the team has changed with injuries over the last two weeks.
“We had to change to something different. We also had to pick a team to physically try and defend against set plays. That was as big a team as we could get out.
“Set plays were a problem and it was actually a problem when it comes to tackling because you don’t want to put a foot in and give a free-kick away with that group of lads coming at you.
“For Barry Bannan, Ikechi Anya, James McArthur, the smaller guys, to keep playing away I am really, really proud of them. It is an absolute honour to work with them.”
Strachan singled out Chris Martin, the Derby County striker whose late winner against Slovenia at Hampden