CLARKE FACING DANGER IN A NEW FORM

Boss plans to avoid slip on the ultimate banana skin

WHILE the danger of losing to a makeshift Czech Republic outfit looks low on paper, the history of Scotland’s national team makes it dangerous to form assumptions.

For Steve Clarke’s side, a Nations League meeting with a full-strength Czech Republic squad was always fraught with danger. Against a host team of Under-20 players and backroom staff it becomes a full-scale banana skin.

How it came to this is a cautionary tale on the dangers of staging international football during a world pandemic. On Friday night the Czech FA announced on Twitter that the national team had been disbanded and the game against the Scots cancelled after a Covid-19 outbreak.

UEFA were quick to respond, citing rules which state that any team able to call upon 13 players should play the game.

While West Ham midfielder Tomas Soucek and Roma striker Patrik Schick are self-isolating after contact with a member of the backroom staff who tested positive, the Czechs will now field a fringe team consisting of ‘new players and staff members’ after Viktoria Plzen, Slavia Prague and Sparta Prague joined forces on Friday night to make their players unavailable.

A completely untried team will now be coached by caretaker boss David Holoubek and, for Scotland, all of this brings a new kind of pressure.

Manager Clarke spent Saturday tearing up his existing notes on the Czechs and scrambling around for nuggets on the unknown quantities expected to form an opposition side in Olomouc tonight.

‘We can find individual clips of individual players that we can piece together,’ said the Scotland boss before boarding a flight from Edinburgh. ‘We will know from the various sources we look at and all the internet platforms. There’s lots there.

‘It won’t just be a name in the squad. It will be a name and we will know what position he plays for his club. And we will know if he is right-footed or left-footed. We will know enough about the individuals — how they are coached and lineup we will have to wait and see.’

Even for one of the old heads of British coaching an on-off-on fixture with an ever-changing cast list of opponents set against the backdrop of a world pandemic is a new one.

UEFA’s determination to shoehorn Nations League pool qualifiers into three international breaks before Christmas was always a risky venture, concerned more with the interests of broadcasters than it was with the safety of players and staff.

While the SFA have spent the weekend allaying the concerns of clubs in the SPFL over flying to a country removed from the UK government’s list of safe-fly venues just last week, the chaos enveloping the game poses further questions of UEFA’s determination to press ahead with international football.

For all the talk of keeping international players in a Covid-compliant bubble, the Czech example shows how difficult it is to avoid community transmission. For a Scottish game already placed on the naughty step by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon there is an apprehension over tonight’s game not restricted to events on the pitch.

‘I think football had to come back,’ says Clarke. ‘Industry had to come back. We are part of an industry. We are part of the world. We cannot make everyone sit in the house forever.

‘There comes a time when you have to start lifting restrictions and allow people to get back to normal life. We are just a part of that.’

While the sentiment is noble, almost nothing surrounding Scotland’s meeting with the Czech Republic — or football’s return in general — feels like ‘normal life’.

Friday’s 1-1 draw with Israel at Hampden — played at an empty stadium — was a surreal affair.

While players are growing accustomed to being swabbed two or three times a week, Scotland’s manager still finds coronavirus protocols a strange and unsettling business. International football, like the club game, is keeping up a pretence of normality until the real thing returns.

‘I’m uncomfortable when it comes to the household testing,’ acknowledged Clarke. ‘I struggled a little bit with them. But listen, you have to do it. Thirty seconds of an uncomfortable procedure but it is very important that everyone follows protocol.

‘Around the camp it has been very good. There has been no real contact with anyone outside our group, our squad. And it’s obviously good here; our hotel is pretty quiet at the moment, there’s no one on campus, the students are not back yet.

‘It’s really quite quiet on camp and walking across the training ground there’s not a lot of people around.

‘For us it has been reasonably straightforward. It might be a bit more intense when we go away, obviously travelling on the flight and the buses and when we have to have the masks on and in and around the hotel.

‘I believe we have our own floor and we will take our own chef. Listen, we take every precaution to make sure everyone can be as safe as they possibly can.’

SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell admitted clubs in Scotland — as in the Czech Republic — have sought assurances over the safety of their prized assets. That UEFA’s main concern seems to be keeping the games coming for broadcasters is a disturbing, if unsurprising, state of affairs.

Avoiding a default in television contracts has been football’s top priority from day one of lockdown and Scotland is no exception.

Acknowledging that he who pays the piper calls the tune, all Clarke and his players can do is trust the SFA to protect their welfare by maintaining a bio-secure bubble as far as possible.

‘In general life now it has changed for everyone,’ reasoned the Scotland boss. ‘When you are going out now it has changed for everyone.

‘You have to think about when you are going out, you have to have a face mask when you go into a shop, you don’t want to be meeting someone and shaking their hand, you are always going to be wary of social distancing.

‘And that has carried on into the football. I don’t think we can sit here and moan about following different procedures because we are in a very strange place for the human race at the moment.

‘There are millions around the world affected by this virus. We just have to adapt.

‘Hopefully over a period of time we will get more used to it. Hopefully over a period of time we will find a solution or a vaccine to the virus that will get us back to what everyone would say was a more normal time and place.’