GARETH SOUTHGATE
Can he cope with the poisoned chalice?
WE used to be famed for our rocksolid centre-halves. Now Scottish defenders are slammed as softcentred half-wits.
For Alex McLeish, who stuck his head in where it hurts for his country for 13 years, it’s a sad state of affairs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, our rearguard has made a rear end of things too often.
Gordon Strachan has never hidden from that. But he has never given up on his chosen back line.
And McLeish reckons his old team-mate is right to keep the faith because familiarity breeds defensive mettle.
“Gordon has stuck with the likes of Grant Hanley and Russell Martin, and that’s the right thing to do,” he said.
“There’s nobody else and they have a reasonable partnership. That’s important. So I don’t think the manager has got much experimentation to do at the back.
“We have to just keep encouraging the centre-halves and keep working with them.
“I’m sure Gordon already does this – but just let them see the goals we lost in the last campaign.
“It’s not giving them painful memories, it’s just education.
“What you see with Hanley is he’s a real battler. He’s not the quality of say the German centre-halves, but he’s shown a reasonable level for Scotland.
“We just have to look back at the last campaign and some of the goals we conceded, watch the videos and get them analysed to try to tidy up some loose ends and cracks.”
The likes of Hanley, Martin and Gordon Greer have got commitment in spades.
But, collectively, they have given the nation more heart attacks than scotch pies and fish suppers combined.
McLeish knows, however, that a strong partnership can trump raw ability.
For years, he and Willie Miller were, by turns, the rock and the hard place opposition strikers got caught between when facing Aberdeen and Scotland.
So innate was their mental link, they more often than not kept players of Alan Hansen and Dave Narey’s calibre out of the national team.
And should Hanley and Martin, Strachan’s apparent first-choice pairing, discover the same sixthsense, McLeish offered a personal anecdote to illustrate their potential worth to Scotland.
He said: “Alan Hansen was a magnificent player and I wouldn’t say I was at the level he was at. But I knew I could play and have a great understanding with Willie Miller.
“I remember Willie being dropped for a World Cup qualifier in Israel in 1981. I was alongside Kenny Burns and the first half was a complete shambles. Somehow we survived to half-time at 0-0.
“At the interval, Jock Stein said: ‘Right. Kenny – midfield. Willie – on at centre-half.’
“We won 1-0 when Kenny Dalglish scored from my flick on.”
The rest, as they say, is history.