McGinn was drunk on success in Belgrade — now he’s got taste for glory with Scots

THE night Scotland burst the dam of desperation in Belgrade, John McGinn broke the promise he made to himself eight years earlier.

At the age of 19, the midfielder won his first senior medal playing for St Mirren in the Scottish League Cup final. Substituted nine minutes from the end of a 3-2 win over Hearts, the game passed by in a blur of flashing images.

To avoid a repeat, team-mate Steven Thompson, now a BBC broadcaster, offered his younger colleague a word of advice.

‘He said to me: “If you get to this stage again, make sure you soak everything in”,’ McGinn recalls now.

He tried his best to listen. He resolved to take in his surroundings and absorb the key moments of his career right up until the moment David Marshall saved that penalty from Aleksandar Mitrovic and it all fell to bits.

The memories of Scotland reaching their first major finals in 23 years are vague now. Images of the team performing a conga around the hotel lounge are fuzzy.

The morning after the night before, on the flight home, things became distinctly vague.

‘I have become better at remembering things and making sure I enjoy it and don’t get too drunk after it,’ laughs the Aston Villa midfielder. ‘But I have to be honest and say I was the drunkest man in Belgrade after that game!’

Qualification was more than a monkey off Scotland’s back. More of a circus troop of chimpanzees. Relief mixed with disbelief and joy to ensure the entire nation felt something in their eye.

‘That night, Ryan Christie’s interview summed it up,’ laughs McGinn now. ‘That was the way the whole squad felt. It was just incredible.

‘I was lucky enough to go to all the games when I was younger and that interview was an outpouring of the sheer desperation.

‘When Luka Jovic scored the equaliser to take it to extra-time it was like a dagger in the back and I thought: “Oh no, here we go again, we have just joined the list of nearly men”.

‘But the proudest thing that whole night was how well we played. That made it feel special.

‘It wasn’t just a penalty shoot-out victory, it was the way we went to celebrate after an enormous amount of pressure and having performed the way we did.’

Until Belgrade, Scotland’s national team were drowning. A 23-year battle with obscurity and self-doubt had drained hope and confidence from the national psyche. A generation of younger fans grew up with no knowledge of how it felt to watch their country at a major finals.

Yet the emergence of talents such as Scott McTominay — Manchester United’s best player in the Europa League final defeat to Villarreal — Kieran Tierney, Billy Gilmour, Nathan Patterson and David Turnbull breeds cautious optimism that qualification for the Euros might not be an end in itself. More of a beginning.

‘Hopefully, that can give us the confidence now,’ adds McGinn. ‘I think we are playing with a wee bit more swagger.

‘Maybe not as much as we could play with. But there is certainly a lot more confidence and a lot of younger players are coming through now who look the part so, moving forward, hopefully we can make this a regular occurrence.’

He is too modest to mention his own contribution to the cause. A haul of ten goals in 17 internationals saw him voted Scotland’s International Player of the Year by the Football Writers’ Association, an accolade sealed by the overhead kick which earned a valuable point against Austria in the opening qualifying game for the Qatar 2022 World Cup.

‘That was something I have never, ever executed and that is me being perfectly honest,’ he grins. ‘I like to try and have a laugh and joke in training and I attempt it all the time but never, ever successfully. It was a spur-of-themoment thing.

‘That was one of the most special goals I have scored and, going into the Euros, I think we will have to show our identity. We will have to show everything we’ve got.

‘You look at the players, those playing down here or up the road, everyone has got their own style of play, their own identity and the thing this manager has brought to the team is the understanding that we need to show personality on the pitch.

‘Before, we were trying too hard to play as a team and forgetting how good we are individually, so it is important to give a nice balance. We are trying to get that now.’

Pick the word which traditionally embodies the typical Scotland international and most will plump for ‘gallus’.

McGinn (pictured) is neither arrogant or boastful.

Likeable and infectious, his confidence stems from those hours of practice spent perfecting overhead kicks and other unlikely manoeuvres with his footballing brothers

Ryan Christie summed up the way the whole squad felt

on a trampoline in the back garden. ‘It’s not like when I was at St Mirren I spent 10-15 minutes at the end of training practising overhead kicks,’ he says. ‘It was something you did in your own time and I used to pretend I was Zinedine Zidane, doing overhead kicks on the trampoline. ‘It is not like you think about it until you are actually there, in that moment, and you think: “I’m actually going to try this”. The thing is you don’t have the springs to help you get up higher, you’ve just got some Toryglen soil…’

The overhead kick — like so many of his recent goals for Scotland — happened in an empty stadium and that remains a source of regret. The joy of returning to a major finals will be dampened by the restrictions forced by a fading pandemic, yet McGinn is set on avoiding another Belgrade. He wants to soak in the atmosphere, dwell in the moment and recall every detail for the grandkids.

Asked what he looks forward to most, he admits: ‘I think it will be the build-up for me. You are absolutely off your head if you think you don’t read a couple of things and listen to a couple of the previews and get excited about it, because we should.

‘It has been 23 years we have been waiting, so we should enjoy it. But a few days before the game, that’s when you should ignore all that.

‘Neil Lennon used to say: “Ignore the noise. It is all just noise, blank it out”. That is the advice I have taken from him, so I will enjoy the build-up, I will enjoy going to Spain with the boys, preparing and making sure we are in the best shape we can be. But once it gets closer to the game I will blank out the noise.

‘If you can do that, the experience will be mind-blowing and hopefully we can be the first squad to get through to the last 16.’