Beating England would have been greater than Gothenburg for Gordon & me...we’re still gutted But two-goal Griff’s Hampden heroics have fired up our hopes for future
IT’S nine days and counting but Mark McGhee is still waiting for the pain to subside. Nine days since Leigh Griffiths fired Scotland to the brink of the greatest international victory of our lifetime.
And nine days since Harry Kane took it all away again with a jab of his right boot. The Spurs man might as well have planted it in McGhee’s unmentionables because he has never known an agony quite like it.
In fact, now he has had time to mull over exactly what went on at Hampden on June 10, the Scotland No.2 has developed a clear picture of just how close he and Strachan came to securing the single greatest victory of their combined careers.
He said: “Gordon and I are agreed if we had managed to win that game 2-1 then it would have been the best result of our entire football careers, never mind just in management. Forget Gothenburg, forget everything else, it would have been that good.
“So to have it taken away in that manner? It was that bad.”
Forget Gothenburg? The rainsoaked night McGhee and Strachan helped Aberdeen conquer the might of Real Madrid and marched straight into history? Bigger than that?
Now we’re getting a real insight into how much this job means to McGhee and, by extension, to the manager himself. So much, in fact, that McGhee has spent most of these last nine days reliving two minutes of them over and over. And over.
He said: “Certainly, what I’ve done over the last week or so is I keep reliving the last couple of minutes between going 2-1 up and England equalising, wondering if there was something we could have done. “But we didn’t have any subs left so we couldn’t alter it that way. We couldn’t make a change and slow the whole thing down. Then amid the fervour of the whole thing and the tiredness that was coming over them all after their heroic efforts, it was difficult to get any sort of message on we might have wanted to.
“But you never know. Had we changed something and then lost a goal we would have been asking ourselves why we had changed it.”
And yet through the watery-eyed agony of it all a new picture is starting to emerge. A wholly unusual one of Scottish hope and optimism.
With just four Group F games to go, McGhee has never felt quite so good about this team’s future.
He said: “The campaign felt re-energised after the Slovenia game which is why we went into the England match feeling hope and expectation.
“We didn’t want to be too vocal but we did feel good about it – and we were proven right. But that all stemmed back to the Slovenia game. It wasn’t about anything in particular Gordon or I had done other than identify the importance of the group of Celtic players in the squad and the addition of Stuart Armstrong.
“He has been a huge bonus and has emerged as a player who has had a great influence on those two results.”
Cynics – and after such a soul-sapping era of Scottish failure it’s hard to be anything else – may not exactly share McGhee’s upwardly mobile outlook for these players.
Strachan’s Scotland have won just three of their last 11 qualifiers and only two from six in this campaign.
McGhee said: “People ask what makes us think we can end the campaign with four wins when we started it so poorly. It’s because this is a different Scotland team now.
“I am convinced if the squad we have today had started this campaign then we would have done better.
“It has a very different feel to it now. Even last year, when the Celtic players were coming in they were a bit subdued in some ways. But all of those boys have brought a new energy to it.
“Kieran Tierney getting his teeth whacked and then coming in the next day wanting to play? That sort of attitude is what gives us a chance.
“It’s probably the best period we’ve had, you feel there is something there. You feel suddenly we’ve got a chance.
“The way Griffiths took his goals is another part of the change. We now have a player capable of winning international matches with a bit of individual brilliance. That is something we have been missing.
“But it’s not just about the Celtic players. Andy Robertson has improved enormously over the last year. There are others coming to the fore at the right time and that’s what caused such a change to our chances.”
If that all sounds a bit like jam tomorrow then it’s probably because it is. But better jam tomorrow than nine days of a taste as sour as this.
● McGhee was speaking at the McDonald’s and SFA community football day in Giffnock.