‘No dead games when you play for Scotland’
● Clarke puts trust in Devlin and Burke
Clarke will hand Aberdeen defender Mikey Devlin his international debut while keeping striker Lawrence Shankland in reserve after insisting his side have everything to play for against Russia in Moscow tonight.
The Scotland manager knows many are claiming the Group I fixture is meaningless as four defeats in their opening six qualifiers have left the Scots trailing second-placed Russia by nine points in the bid to qualify automatically for Euro 2020.
Oli Burke will lead the line with the on-loan Alaves player earning his ninth cap. Shankland, whose call up from Championship side Dundee United sparked so much debate, will be on the bench.
If tonight’s clash between Kazakhstan and Cyprus ends in a draw, the Russians can secure qualification with a win over Scotland at the Luzhniki Stadium. As of yesterday, the Russian Football Union had sold more than 60,000 tickets. There will be around 1,000 Scots in the stadium.
Their chances of seeing a surprise victory were hit by the news Kenny Mclean pulled out with an injury shortly before the squad travelled to Russia yesterday afternoon. The Norwich City midfielder is the latest potential starter to withdraw through injury after Ryan Jack, Grant Hanley, Liam Cooper and Oli Mcburnie.
Devlin is set to start alongside Charlie Mulgrew in the centre of defence. He has been picked ahead of Kilmarnock’s Stuart Findlay and Motherwell’s Declan Gallagher, both of whom were late call-ups.
“People say it is a dead rubber,” said Clarke. “I disagree entirely. There’s never a dead game when you are representing your country.
“You want to win, you want to perform well. I think we are taking at least 1,000 people over there. It is really imporsteve
tant. Those guys have shelled out an obscene amount of money to get to Moscow.
“So that is an objective: to perform well and play well and try to give them something to smile about and cheer about on the way home.”
Clarke also emphasised the need to finish in third place after being third seeds in the group. Scotland are currently fifth – behind even Kazakhstan and Cyprus. He said: “That is the minimum position we should finish in.
“We have to put ourselves under pressure to finish third.”
While the conditions and geographical details might be very different, the circumstances are broadly similar.
Zagreb in the height of summer can never be mistaken for Moscow as winter sets in. But there are undeniable parallels between what Scotland were experiencing six years ago prior to a game against Croatia and what they are facing now, including an overwhelming sense of apathy towards the international side.
It was June 2013. Manager Gordon Strachan was toiling. He could even have been described as on the ropes. Like many new Scotland managers in recent times, he was struggling to inspire the desired bounce. Scotland’s hopes of joining the latest World Cup party were already quashed. Doubts had already begun to form about whether he was the right man after successive defeats by Wales and Serbia.
Steve Clarke is not quite at that stage yet. But he needs a spark. He is desperate for his reign to be ignited. It was much the same for Strachan when he led his tired, depleted and already eliminated squad to play Croatia, the No 4-ranked team in the world at the time.
There was little expectation and not much more interest. Despite such an unpromising context Scotland secured a surprise and invigorating victory thanks to a first-half goal from Robert Snodgrass, one of only three members of the current squad involved that night (David Marshall and Stuart Armstrong were on the bench).
Strachan’s reign, while not delivering the yearned for major finals appearance, suddenly became a more sanguine enterprise, concluding with a run of six unbeaten games as Scotland just failed to secure a play-off spot for the World Cup in Russia last year.
They have finally got here, just 16 months too late. Clarke is now in Strachan’s shoes. He has returned to a city where he might reasonably feel he is owed some luck. It was here, amid the tombs of Tsars and onion domes, that he experienced one of his worst nights in football. He was assistant to manager Avram Grant as Chelsea lost the Champions League final to Manchester United after a penalty shoot-out. “Someone had to drag it up,” he said yesterday.
Chelsea were a John Terry slip on a sodden pitch away from winning Europe’s premier trophy for the first time in their history. Clarke’s anguish was Sir Alex Ferguson’s delight. Chelsea did become European champions four years later, but this was of little consequence to Clarke, who had moved on to the Liverpool assistant manager’s post by then and was about to take the reins at West Bromwich Albion.
“It is not very often you have a player going up to take a penalty to win the Champions League,” he recalled. “Unfortunately, John slipped and hit the post with the penalty. It was not our night. Most of the team that played that night in Moscow won the Champions League a few years later, maybewhentheywerepasttheirbest. If ever a group of players deserved to win the Champions League, it was that group of Chelsea players.”
The neutrals in the crowd favoured Chelsea, given their well-established Russian connection. Roman Abramovich was especially downcast as his dream of winning the European Cup in his homeland evaporated in such agonising fashion. “I did not speak to Roman an awful lot,” recalled Clarke. “I was only the assistant. The various managers I worked with at that time were more likely to spend time with Roman than I was. He was a good owner for the club.”
Knowing there was little more could be done might have provided some comfort for Clarke. A long league season of daily contact with players, a pre-final camp where he had time to formulate tactics, it sounds like paradise to him now. In con