FEARLESS CLARKE IS PERFECT FIT FOR SCOTS
Smart, savvy, a straight shooter, a training pitch perfectionist, tactically sound but, above all else,
STEVE ClarkE is a brave, brave man. No, that’s not some crack about taking on the Scotland job being akin to a professional suicide mission — merely a statement of fact.
and it is Clarke’s proven ability to hold his nerve, to stake everything on being right, that will matter most as he tackles the biggest challenge of his footballing life.
Because, although he’s signed on until 2022, the new national team head coach will know that even the most popular of appointees to this pressurised post are rarely given freedom to fail.
He’s been offered the job because the SFa believe in his ability to end our long, agonising, frustrating, morale-sapping absence from major finals. Starting immediately. That cannot be stressed enough. With Hampden already guaranteed joint-hosting rights for next summer’s continent-wide Euro 2020 Finals, the prospect of Scotland missing out is very nearly unthinkable. Certainly unpalatable.
Which means Clarke is effectively backing himself, regardless of injuries, call-offs or any of the other traditional curses that come with this gig, to emerge triumphant from a two-legged play-off in March. Or else.
Scotland having already followed our well-worn pattern of slipping out of the normal qualification process at the outset, the fall-back route provided by alex Mcleish’s Nations league victory looks a far more likely route back to the big time.
So, 180 minutes of football against Norway or some similarly-placed European middleweight, with only overwhelming joy or utter despair — there can be no in between — waiting at the end of it?
It takes some nerve to sign up for that. Which is what makes Clarke such a good fit.
Yes, he’s smart and savvy, a straight-talking coach who gives his players just the right amount of instruction and information to get the job done. His skill on the training pitch is proven beyond doubt, his tactical nous given more than pass marks.
But, more than that, there’s a fearless streak about Clarke that showed itself the moment he took the kilmarnock job. a ballsy move, if ever there was.
Sure, in hindsight, it looks like the ideal career move. Jump into the Scottish game, work some magic on an unglamorous provincial club — and get back on the radar of the chairmen and chief executives who had forgotten about all your solid club work south of the Border.
But kilmarnock weren’t just some underachieving side sitting below the water line of mid-table mediocrity when they rather surprisingly landed a coach of Clarke’s pedigree in October 2017.
The ayrshire club, the team he had supported as a boy, were sitting bottom of the Scottish Premiership. Going down wasn’t so much a possibility as a terrifying probability. It was a situation that would have inspired only trepidation among many a coach.
Think about the consequences if Clarke, a respected assistant at liverpool and Chelsea but sacked as gaffer by West Brom and then reading, had added a relegation to his CV. Where would he have gone next?
He could hardly be unaware of the risk he was taking. Nor could he have been under any illusions about the team he was inheriting.
Yet in he went. and succeed he did. Brilliantly, effectively, playing a brand of football that proved enormously popular with punters — and got results.
as alluded to by Clarke himself during Sunday’s farewell speech, his greatest achievement at rugby Park was making locals care about their team again.
Same again, please, Steve. Because there are millions of us just desperately seeking an excuse to fall back in love with Scotland. The decision to appoint Clarke is already unusually popular, even allowing for the fact that most new national team gaffers can be guaranteed at least a qualified welcome.
Even among the permanently cynical, the growing band who believe that following Scotland with genuine hope in your heart will always be a mug’s game, there have been nods of approval and a distinct lack of grumbling.
and it’s obvious that part of his popularity goes beyond the job he did with killie.
The cojones he showed to mouth off at the SFa even when he was in the running for the Scotland gig? Even if you didn’t agree with all of his arguments, that was impressive.
Credit the Hampden authorities for overlooking the ferocious fire their new employee has unleashed upon them, incidentally.
Clarke hasn’t just taken aim at the disciplinary system or individual referees, though. His decision to highlight the continuing scourge of sectarian abuse, while hardly earning him the status of pioneer, carried real weight.
and the sadness in his voice, when he said he woke up every morning and thanked Chelsea for taking him away from this enduring curse, hit home with all but the irredeemably deplorable.
Character matters, when it comes to leading a team. and Clarke seems like someone whose lead is worth following.
In a job where limited time is spent working with the actual team, that might make all the difference.
There is no doubt that, however grateful we may have been for his Nations league triumph, Mcleish was underachieving.
We’re not asking for the world. Not even demanding automatic qualification for the World Cup.
But the Euros? They should be a realistic target every four years. Whatever happens in next month’s qualifiers against Cyprus and Belgium, Clarke will get his 50-50 shot at fulfilling that ambition next spring.
It’s hardly going to be easy. The Scotland job isn’t a promise, merely an invitation to step up and take an all-or-nothing swing at sporting immortality.
about 400 years before Christ was born, way back when Craig Brown was just a laddie, a Greek historian copied down a much-disputed line from a general involved in the war between Sparta and athens.
‘The bravest are those who have a vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.’
Words that should be painted, in foot-high letters, on the walls of Clarke’s new Hampden office. He’d get the message. and take the challenge on, anyway.