Alex McLeish
Former Scotland boss and our Euro 2020 columnist Aggressive approach will be key for Faroes clash
TWO draws from two games against Austria and Israel isn’t a perfect start to Scotland’s World Cup qualification campaign. But it certainly isn’t a disastrous start either and Steve Clarke will now be looking to end the international camp with a really strong performance and win over the Faroe Islands at Hampden.
Let’s not forget that Austria are a good side and I think that they will be there or thereabouts come the end of the campaign and will be fighting with ourselves and Denmark for those two qualification places.
Yes, it would have been great to have won both matches so far but we are looking like a strong team and it is about reinforcing that and building on that going forward. Scotland are very much in this section and have a chance to qualify from it.
The games against Israel have proven to be tricky for Scotland over the last few years and Sunday night was no different. If you are biased, you will say that Scotland just didn’t play well but you have to say that Israel’s passing and linking was very good.
If you look at the way that Scotland set about Serbia in the opening minutes of the game a few months ago, that was tremendous. We pressed them really high and never let them out, but we couldn’t replicate that the other night.
If you look at the squad, it is probably the strongest that we have and we now have a bit of consistency of selection. If you look back to when we qualified, significantly it was similar personnel to what we had seen through Stevie’s reign.
You are always looking to have the same core of a squad and a team in place as an international manager but then you get guys like Che Adams that come in and take their chance and I think he will prove to be a tremendous boost for Scotland going forward.
I thought he had a pretty good game against Israel the other night. You could see the quality of his runs, he held it up and he got an assist for the goal.
He looks like he can be a big asset for us and it would be great to see him open his account for Scotland if he gets the chance to play at Hampden this evening.
Scotland have to go into the game and be really positive. I have got no doubt that Stevie will do that and that he will look to set about them, have the tempo high from the beginning and have his best attacking options on the park.
To his credit, he changed the system in the second half on Sunday night and went with a four at the back and it will be interesting to see how he approaches the Faroes game in terms of the system and the personnel.
The three at the back worked very well for him during the last round of fixtures and that is a tried and trusted formation. But he is not afraid to change it and to do it quickly enough to turn a game on its head, which was the case on Sunday.
Scotland looked a different team after he switched it for the second half and that can often be the case when you make a tweak to the formation. We were certainly more dominant after the break than we were early on because that was a difficult 45 minutes for us.
That certainly shouldn’t be the case against the Faroes and there will have to be an aggression and a positivity about Scotland right from the off tonight. I don’t doubt that there will be.
If you go into any game thinking ‘we have to watch that we don’t suffer an embarrassing result here’ then you have a negative mentality and that is selfdefeating. I expect Scotland to be on the front foot right from kick-off here.
Fixtures like this are never as easy as some people make out and you can find yourself in a no-win situation in many regards because there is an expectation that you are victorious by a comfortable margin.
I have had loads of games like that in my career as a manager and a player. One that comes to mind is the Costa Rica game at the World Cup in 1990 and that was a game that we went into with the favourites tag.
We had analysis done on them in terms of their players individually and them as a team and it was said that the keeper was susceptible to crosses so we were to put balls into the box and he would flap at them. There was something like 21 crosses put in and he held 20 of them!
There was this impression that they weren’t a good side at all and that made us a bit apprehensive. These are the kind of games we have all seen and that Scotland are meant
You can find yourself in a no-win situation
to win easily and I had one as a manager against Kazakhstan.
We do have a settled squad right now and Stevie has brought in the likes of Adams into the group and Jack Hendry has come in at the other end of the park as well. Against the Faroes, it should all be about what Scotland do in an attacking sense and we could see Adams and Lyndon Dykes given the chance to link up together. This could be the time to try that partnership but, at the same time, Stevie won’t feel this is the time to try too many things out. This is a game for sure things, to make sure there are no slip-ups and to win handsomely.
We are expected to dismantle the Faroes fairly easily and I expect the boys to do that.