Clarke has brief history of using his time wisely
Time is a funny thing. You can be up to your neck in work and it seems like the clock is on a go slow.
Yet you might have a rare day of peace to get busy doing nothing and it zips past like a bullet train.
When it comes to international football, time can be a blessing or a curse.
Some gaffers love it.
They don’t have the day to day stresses of club football, trying to stay on the three-games-a-week hamster wheel while working with an axe hovering over them.
They put in the hours scouting their team, talking to club bosses, going to games and so on.
Some turn into bandits on the golf course during the down time as well.
But others get driven crazy by the vast empty spaces in between the international get-togethers.
It’s been a problem for plenty of Scotland coaches in the past.
Craig Levein had about five minutes to come up with a plan for a crucial qualifier against the Czechs more than a decade ago and he ended up with a whiteboard featuring the infamous 4-6-0 formation with strikers playing as extra full-backs.
And Gordon Strachan too. He went a bit doolally in his Hampden office before we faced Gibraltar and went with a one-man back four that saw our trousers pulled down when the minnows scored.
Steve Clarke constantly admits he hates the time he has on his hands.
It’s the one part of the gig that really frustrates him.
Clarke loves boots on the turf every single day rather than for a few hours every couple of months.
But, funnily enough, this is a guy who seems to use his time wisely, rather than going all Jack Nicholson from The Shining on the sixth floor in Mount Florida.
When Clarke came in he had to take a couple of sore scuddings early on but he spent the weeks and months of inactivity that followed coming up with a plan that actually worked.
There was no wacky reinventing of the wheel or experimental formations that could have been concocted on a LSDfuelled hippy retreat. Clarke
Clarke has made long suffering nation hard to beat and able to win
had the clarity of thought to figure out how the heck we could get Kieran Tierney and Andy Robertson in the same team, without upsetting the entire balance of the side.
He worked out how to make the most of having about 150 No.10s at his disposal and getting some of them on the pitch without leaving the team wide open to exploitation from stronger sides.
Clarke discovered how to make this long suffering nation a combination of hard to beat and able to win.
He has made us both durable and entertaining – which is a minor miracle.
He got us to the Euros and is in with a right good shout for the World Cup.
These play-offs will be no walk in the park with a hugely motivated Ukraine and then Wales – who have made a habit of nuking our managers over the years.
But he has us believing again, which is a damn sight more than we’ve had in the main over the last 20 years.
We just need to hope that old devil of time hasn’t played tricks with him in the last wee while and his blueprint won’t need much of a tweak this week.
It’s fair to say it’s a bit of a bummer losing Tierney after practically building a team around him.
Nathan Patterson’s injury is another headache.
There’s a suspicion Clarke won’t be guilty of over-thinking it, he won’t have the pencils up the nose in his office and a whiteboard with more equations than a Stephen Hawking lecture.
Clarke can find a winning formula this week and when it comes to the World Cup, this might be our time.