Improving minnows will be all the wiser after heavy defeats, insists wary Strachan
GORDON STRACHAN believes Gibraltar will strip shrewder for the experience of suffering heavy defeats in their opening group games when they front up against Scotland for the first time today.
Gibraltar lost by an aggregate of 21-0 against their four other Group D rivals last autumn. They suffered 7-0 hidings against Poland and Republic of Ireland, before replacing goalkeeper Jordan Perez with Jamie Robba and going down 3-0 at home to Georgia.
Of more merit, only conceding four times to Brazil 2014 champions Germany in November was an encouraging sign.
Strachan has that performance in Nuremberg marked down as an example of the section’s minnows growing increasingly determined to do a professional stifling job on their more illustrious opponents.
‘I would think they would be wiser now,’ said Strachan. ‘They’ve made a couple of changes and, from really just going out to enjoy their first couple of games and the excitement of all that, I think they went to: “No, we have to be a bit more difficult than this”.
‘The fun element went out of it and the reality is that they don’t want to get beaten with sevens and eights every time, they want to perform better. They made that clear against Germany.
‘There was a bit of reality about it. The world champions only scored four. That’s enough to win a game of football. But that was an improvement from what we saw in the first couple of games.’
Strachan started drilling a new system into his squad in training when they convened on Monday and continued to work on those plans in the three days after edging Northern Ireland 1-0 in midweek.
Only England and Germany have beaten Strachan’s Scotland in the last 12 fixtures and the national manager has backed his men to handle a different dynamic, that of being 1/50 favourites to record a landslide victory on home turf.
‘We’re expecting to win,’ said Strachan. ‘Every game has its own pressures, no matter who you are playing. We’ve dealt with expectations, crowds, the players we’ve played against and the systems we’ve played against in a way that we’re pleased and proud of.
‘I think the fans will want something to warm them up straight away. But you can’t be sucked in to trying to score from the first touch of the ball. You have to be patient and find the weaknesses. We don’t want to get panicky and get rushed into things. We will try to get forward but that can’t happen all the time.’
Darren Fletcher adopted the honour of the captaincy as substitute Christophe Berra got the 2015 international year off to a winning start for Scotland on Wednesday night. That was a job Scott Brown — rested in midweek — had grown into during his midfield colleague’s absence from the set-up and retained when Fletcher returned to the fold for the start of Euro 2016 qualifying.
With Fletcher, 31, playing regular English top-flight football with West Brom since the turn of the year and back to full health, he has been tipped to take the armband for Scotland once again when he and Brown team up.
The decision on who leads the side out today will not cause even the mildest stir in the happy camp of Strachan, who said: ‘Only if you’ve got an ego would you worry about who is captain. The two boys we’re talking about genuinely want the team to do well, they don’t care about who is captain.
‘It’s not an issue whatsoever. Everybody is making a fuss of it apart from us. The lack of egos is absolutely a strength in this squad.’