World Cup warm-up games should come with a health warning. Ideally a manager tries out players and gets some minutes into the legs. If he is lucky, he might avoid a morale-sapping defeat and post-match boos. If his fortune fails to hold, a key player will succumb to injury.
When Billy Gilmour fell to the turf clutching his knee against Curacao, a Hampden crowd of 44,000 took a sharp intake of breath. On a list of undesirable outcomes for Scotland’s big World Cup send-off, the loss of the Napoli midfielder was a top-three item. The fact he was able to walk at all raised hopes that his removal was precautionary in nature. When he failed to return to the pitch for the full-time farewell to fans, the penny dropped.
Covid curtailed the little midfielder’s involvement in the delayed Euro 2020 finals. Ill fortune struck again when a post-match scan brought news that the Serie A ball-retainer would not be flying to America with team-mates. Nor, it transpired, would he be making it to the family wedding he planned to attend later the same night.
These things seem to dog Scotland before big tournaments. Kenny McLean missed out on Euro 2020. Four years later, Lewis Ferguson went under the surgeon’s knife before Lyndon Dykes was carried from the training pitch at Lesser Hampden in pain.
Gilmour’s late sorrow served as a fresh reminder of football’s carefree brutality. While Aaron Hickey took a forearm smash to the face and came through, the midfielder had no one near him when he crumpled to the turf in discomfort. Later came the news that a player of real talent would not be travelling to the United States to face Haiti, Morocco and Brazil.
While Steve Clarke can take solace from the fact that central midfield is an area where the team are well served, no one does what Gilmour does. Devastating news for the player brought a grievous blow to the team as well.
A dispiriting end to an otherwise decent day, Scotland scored four goals to win their first Hampden friendly since Denmark in 2016 and Lawrence Shankland scored two of them. Despite conceding a poor opener to the talented Tahith Chong, the Scots derived the benefit of Jurgen Locadia charging into Hickey with reckless intent. A stray forearm drew a yellow card, rightly upgraded to red after a VAR review.
Those who felt that it would have made more sense to delay a new contract for Clarke until the three Group C games in America were done and dusted would have been vocal if Scotland had lost to ten-man Curacao.
The chance of that diminished when Findlay Curtis, the 19-year-old Rangers winger who replaced the luckless Gilmour, scored his first international goal to level things up before the end of a ropey first half.
Tyler Fletcher, the 19-year-old son of former Scotland captain Darren, was one of five substitutions ahead of a much-improved second period and the Manchester United teenager successfully staked his claim for a seat on the plane as Gilmour’s stand-in. The two goals from Shankland were equally welcome, throwing the gauntlet down to selection rival Che Adams.
In all this noise, the wider significance of Scotland taking star billing in their own World Cup send-off was almost lost.
It wasn’t always like this. Defender Scott McKenna spoke after the game of flying to Mexico and Peru early in his Scotland career to play against two nations preparing for the 2018 World Cup finals.
Back then, the Scots were a team for hire. Pre-tournament cannon fodder for teams in need of a quick morale boost before turning round the paper.
“We went to Peru and Mexico and we were the team playing in a send-off,” McKenna recalls. “But it was a send-off for them.
“Between the starting XI at that time we had less than 30 caps back then.
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“Now you would struggle to find anyone in our starting line-up with less than 30 caps.”
When he took the job in 2019, that was always Clarke’s goal. Captain Andrew Robertson has now played 92 times and has Sir Kenny Dalglish’s total of 102 in his sights. John McGinn has played 85 times while evergreen 43-year-old keeper Craig Gordon earned his 84th appearance on Saturday. Scott McTominay will nudge Kenny Miller and David Weir from the top-ten cap holders when he makes his 70th show in America. Earning his 50th cap against Curacao, McKenna secured his own place in the Scotland Hall of Fame.
One of the nations Clarke wanted Scotland to be was Croatia. While the Scotland boss has managed to build a squad of dogged campaigners, he has no Luka Modric in their midst. He does have a McTominay these days and, a league and cup winner with Dinamo Zagreb, McKenna sees his adopted homeland as a team Scotland should strive to emulate.
“Just look at the players they’ve brought through over the last 10-15 years, probably longer, and they continue to do so,” McKenna pointed out.
“It’s quite interesting how they do it: they’re obviously doing it at club level over there as well and that feeds into the national team. They’ve had a lot of success in going deep in tournaments.”
Whenever the conversation turns to Scotland at the World Cup, someone always drops the H-bomb.
History is easy to promise and a good deal harder to deliver. For the national team, tournaments have been a bittersweet torture. Proof of the old maxim that it’s better to travel than it is to arrive.
Eight times they’ve tried to reach the second stage and eight times they have never quite made it. Buoyed by Shankland’s double and Ryan Christie’s tenth international goal from the penalty spot, it would be unwise to read too much into a 4-1 win over a team ranked 83rd in the world playing with ten men. That America represents the latest chance to finally get the monkey off their back, however, is a simple statement of fact.
“Of course we can,” says McKenna. “But that’s the test that everyone is setting us now and we need to rise to that challenge.
“No game is going to be easy over there. I think we showed that in the first half, but it’s up to us to go and rise to it now.”
People have heard this stuff so often that cynicism is natural. Beating Haiti is a minimum requirement in America and would constitute only a fifth win in 24 games at the World Cup. Under Clarke, the Scots failed to give a good account of themselves in the last two tournaments and McKenna knows they need to be better this time. He can hardly deny it.
“I don’t think there is any doubt about that at all,” agreed the centre-half.
“I think at the start of the last campaign we got a point against Switzerland and gave ourselves a chance, and the last game we didn’t quite do enough to give ourselves any chance really.
“I think we threw the kitchen sink at it in the last 10 minutes of the game and they caught us on the counter-attack, and that ultimately killed us.
“But we are going to America to definitely try to do better and hopefully make some history.”
