Scotland’s shocker v Germany was a car crash – nobody could do anything about it

RON ATKINSON would have taken the entire squad out for a drink.

Alex Ferguson wouldn’t have spoken to anyone for days.

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But Steve Clarke will have his own method of dealing with things in the wake of the 5-1 defeat to Germany.

One thing he cannot do, though, is be as overly critical and demanding of the players as he might be if this was a club team.

In international football, as a coach you need to go easy and cut the players some slack.

Look, I’m not going to  annihilate them either.

The reason 200,000 Scots travelled to Germany is because of those lads.

It was their hard work that got everyone there.

I’ve said it before, they give up a lot when it comes to  representing the country,  leaving behind their families at various points in the year.

That said, there’s no doubt they would have been sitting in the team hotel with real regret.

I would imagine Steve and his coaching staff would have sat everyone down yesterday to talk it through.

I don’t even mean tactically.  I just mean having a chat about how to deal with what happened and where does the team go from here.

There are always lessons to be learned.

But sometimes it’s more a case of sticking together and discussing it in a really informal way.

If they asked themselves before the game what chances they gave themselves of getting a draw, it was maybe around 25 per cent. And that’s us at our very best.

What chance of winning? Maybe four or five per cent.

I sat with my family watching it all unfold.

There were 14 of us there  at the start of the night, with everyone really excited as we crowded around the TV.

By the end, I was virtually on my own.

We did our predictions before kick-off and to be  honest, I went  1-0  to Germany.

My son Gavin went 1-1 and another individual, who I  won’t name, piped up with 4-0 to Germany.

Despite that, the team would not have expected to lose  by that many, that’s for sure.

The mindset now has to be that they can do something about it.
I’m in a group chat with the Aberdeen Gothenburg lads  and Andy

Watson posted a message at the final whistle.

It just read, ‘Move along, nothing to see here’.

It was like there had been a car crash and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

You just hope the players  all take something from it to take forward.

Ryan Porteous, for instance, gets sent off for attempting to make a tackle when all he  can do is make a block.

He should have been trying to meet the ball about a foot away from Ilkay Gundogan. Instead he clatters into him.

A tackle isn’t needed there. It’s a block.

But when you see it back, it’s a sore one. At times Scotland were beaten by wonderful moments of skill from the  likes of Jamal Musiala.

We’ll  see how Switzerland and Hungary get on against them in their games now.

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But if we look at things from a tactical point of view, they’ve got an advantage from seeing how Scotland went about it.

Hungary are up next and Marco Rossi will study the way we tried to play.

He’ll be asking himself, should his team simply get behind the ball and just fill  in the spaces without really pressurising people?

Does he just hope that his three centre-backs and goalie are all brilliant on the night?

Does he want to give Toni Kroos space to play passes  left, right and through the middle of them?

Or would it be a better idea to let the German centre-backs have it? I could guarantee that none of them are anywhere near as good as Kroos is with the ball at their feet.

If I was the Hungary coach, I’d be thinking about that.

He’ll maybe also ask his  players if they want to decide their own futures in their game.

If you asked our players  about that, I think we all know the answer.

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It’s up to the players of  Hungary to decide if they’re  just going to hope that Germany have a bad night. But there is time for Scotland to put things right, let’s not forget that.

I really think that once they all get this one out of their  system in the next 48 hours, they’ll be ready to go again.

And they’ll have a steely   determination to make sure that, whatever happens, they do  themselves justice against the Swiss on Wednesday night.

That doesn’t mean running around smashing into folk, by the way, as some people seem  to think. Those days are well and truly gone. You can still get close to people and make things uncomfortable for them.

But for now it’s about hitting the reset button.

The biggest problem the boys will have is the feeling that they  let  the supporters down.

When really the fans wouldn’t be in Germany at all if it wasn’t for all their hard work in the last couple of years.

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