FROM BERGEN TO THE BERNABEU: ALL SCOTLAND’S FOUR-GOAL AWAY WINS

Four-goal away wins for Scotland are like rural buses – they don’t come along too often, so we should maybe celebrate them when they do, writes Matt Vallance.

Saturday night’s 4-0 win over Albania, in Shkoder, was only the 11th time in 248 internationals outside the British Isles in which we have won by four goals.

Overall, Scotland’s away record outside these islands is not good. We first ventured to continental Europe in an end-of-season tour in 1929, opening with our first four-goal win – a 7-3 victory over Norway in Bergen, prior to drawing with Germany and beating the Netherlands.

We would not win by four clear goals again until the 1947 end-of-season European tour, when we stuck six on Luxembourg, without reply. We then had to wait four years for another big win, which arrived courtesy of a 5-0 thrashing of Belgium in Brussels in 1951.

That Brussels win was our last big one on the continent until, arguably, our best away win – the classic 6-2 defeat of Spain in the Bernabeu in June 1963. There was one more four-goal win during the swinging Sixties a 5-0 thrashing of Cyprus in a 1968 World Cup qualifier. More than a decade passed before our next four-goal win, when we beat Norway 4-0 in the Ullevaal in 1979. Then it took us 21 years to produce another fourgoal success, which came on the Berti Vogts-led trip to Korea and Hong Kong in 2002. We ended with a 4-0 victory over Hong Kong, with striker James Mcfadden celebrating so much he missed the flight home.

Four years on, Walter Smith, pictured, led a Scotland squad to Japan for the Kirin Cup, which we won courtesy of a 5-0 win over Bulgaria. That was our last big away win prior to the 6-0 Faro thrashing of Gibraltar in 2015. We then had that 5-1 victory over Malta in 2016 followed by Saturday’s impressive result.