Time has come to accept the new, saddening status quo

Scotland’s invitation to Costa Rica has understandably inspired much reminiscence of the only previous occasion on which the countries’ teams had met. It remains to this day viewed as one of the most sickening and mortifying episodes in our national side’s tortured history.

But surely the positions of the two teams today should cause us to reflect upon not what happened on that day in Genoa, but afterwards.

We, now, are warm-up fodder for a Costa Rican outfit heading to its fifth World Cup out of eight, aiming to reach the knockout phase for a third time.

It’s a tournament which, it should be noted, they will attend alongside Iran and Peru – once reddeners of Ally MacLeod’s face – and Morocco, who remain the last nation to have had the opportunity to drub Scotland at a major tournament.

It is barely a question which of the countries’ World Cup pedigree has been the better in the last 28 years. It should by now have clicked that 1990 was not, in fact, a humiliation: it was a changing of the guard. Alex McLeish was there on the pitch when these two nations’ graphs crossed, and it is now he who is tasked with attempting to drag Scotland’s trend line back towards respectability.

It is right that he has explored all available options in this experimental line-up, for it is a job he must do with scant resources.

It will have been with a stony face that McLeish heard the news, shortly before kick-off, that Scotland’s best under-21 talent had required a late equaliser to prevent Andorra joining the list of countries to have embarrassingly beaten our representative sides.

If that is a measure of where Scotland will be in a generation, running Costa Rica close in a World Cup might eventually be seen as a relative high point.

ALEXMcLEISH

I thought the second half was better than the first.

We were a bit laboured in the first half and we didn’t seem to push up enough.

We sat deep and, with the goal we conceded, we had three central defenders but nobody engaged with the central striker.

It was a good cutback and a good piece of play. They punished us.

We created some good chances in the second half but the difference was how clinical they were with their finish.

We had five new caps in the team. It is a building process.

Costa Rica are a well-drilled team while we are still getting the team to play with a rhythm. In terms of Hungary on Tuesday, we have to be more clinical.

It will be a different team and it will give us a chance to look at other players.

It was a friendly match which gave us the chance to experiment a little bit.

Of course I would love to have a great win ratio but sometimes you have to make that sacrifice.

We have learned a few things that we can use going forward.

Certainly when we analyse the game we will learn even more.

Will we stick with a back three against Hungary? You never know.

We had a really good spell in the second half and we manage to keep good possession and we managed to push Costa Rica back.

We didn’t really need to change it. They are a good side with a lot of clever players. They just had that little bit more nous and experience.

It was a great learning game for us.

“We, now, are warm-up fodder for Costa Rica” “They just had that little bit more nous and experience”