KEITH JACKSON

IT didn’t feel much like having the potential for fun, trudging up to Hampden in the incessant rain on a dank Glasgow autumnal night.

Let’s face it, Scotland versus San Marino is a hard sell at the best of times. And this is hardly them.

But for a match already robbed of any remaining meaning because of the most humiliating, excruciating qualification failures of all time? In the soaking wet? On a Sunday night?

No, this was always going to be more of a test of endurance or perhaps even a punishment exercise than it ever promised to actually be enjoyed.

In fact, let’s be brutally honest here, this felt like the sporting definition of being Scottish, coming as it did so hot on the heels of an ignominious elimination from some other World Cup where huge men with ears on inside out have been playing around for weeks with their oddly-shaped balls.

Yes sir, as Super Sundays go this one was really something. Even by our own well-established standards of abject misery.

And yet Steve Clarke has to take his comfort anywhere he can find it right now. So if this was it, standing there drenched on the touchline watching Scotland overcome the worst team in the world – a country with a smaller population than Ayr town centre – then who was he to grumble?

It’s not every day he’ll get to see Scotland score six goals in 90 minutes and even though this had the feel of being way too little, way too late, at least Clarke was able to get through it unscathed after a bruising first few months in the job.

In any case, every journey has to start somewhere and maybe in months from now this will be looked upon as the first step on Clarke’s redemption trail on the road to Euro 2020.

That’s the dream. But right now, in the middle of this nightmarish campaign, a place in the finals of a major tournament can never have felt so far off as it did at the National Stadium last night.

How ironic then that these finals will be coming here to this very ground because by then it will all feel like a different place in another world.

But the fact remains, as remote COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTLAND... COME ON SCOTL