Leckie: Scotland need Andy Robertson and the rest to stand up and be counted

LET’S form a guard of honour for Andy Robertson as he reaches another milestone as Scotland skipper.

Let’s take a moment to remember just how far he’s come, and just how hard he’s grafted to turn a career that was going nowhere into one littered with medals, memories and great achievements.

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Let’s cross our fingers he still has a long way to go and a whole lot more to offer for both club and country.

Then, let’s forget his past, let his future take care of itself — and worry about the present.

Because as we build up to a game in Warsaw that’s taken on huge significance, there should only be one thing on our left-back’s mind.

Making sure his 80th appearance for the national team is an awful lot better than his 79th was.

No point sugar-coating things here. Robbo was terrible against Croatia, and I’m sure he’ll be beating himself up about it harder than anyone could from the outside.

His passing radar was off, his deliveries from wide were awful.

He might have starred as a front cover superhero in the SFA’s brilliant series of match programmes, but last Friday at Hampden he was miles away from being Captain Fantastic.

Not that he was alone in dropping below his own high standards.

You lost count of how many times wee Billy Gilmour gave the ball away cheaply — and as for those two swingers he took from the edge of the box in the second half?

At least one of them’s still in orbit over Mount Florida.

Ryan Christie was another key man who couldn’t get into the game.

Scott McTominay had one decent effort shovelled away by their keeper, but that apart looked way short of the guy who’s taken Serie A by storm this season.

All in all, Steve Clarke got it absolutely bang on when he sat down in front of the media at time up and, asked for his first thoughts on a winning performance, replied: “I think we can be much better.”

That wasn’t him being a grumpy sod, he wasn’t trying to take the jam out of our doughnuts after a result that players, fans and management alike really needed.

No, he was just being honest.

Fact is, we’d been played off the park until the Croats went down to ten men.

Even after that we huffed and puffed for so long that it felt like a second straight goalless draw at home was inevitable.

Thank goodness, then, for the pace and trickery of the mesmerising Ben Doak, and the finishing ability of John McGinn as time ran out.

Between them, these two pocket rockets smuggled us out of Hampden with three crucial points.

But even though I stick by my opinion at the time that we deserved those points in the end — if only because we refused to accept that the goal wasn’t coming — we can’t kid ourselves that the same level of performance will be good enough against Poland on Monday night.

Clarke’s right, we MUST be better this time, because so much now hangs on it.

With four minutes of the 90 left against the Croats, we were staring down the barrel of automatic relegation back to the Nations League second-tier.

Yet all of a sudden, as Doak left Josko Gvardiol peching yet again, and supersub McGinn was wheeling away doing that specky celebration of his, the whole group had opened up for us.

A win in Warsaw now gets us a play-off to stay in with the elite.

Harness that to defeat for Croatia at home to Portugal and we might even sneak into second, which in turn would launch us into Pot One for the World Cup draw.

If that’s not an incentive for Captain Andy, wee Billy, McTomadona, Christie and everyone else around them to hurl everything they have at these Poles . . . well, you wonder what it would take.

Every man in this squad has had to haul himself up by the bootlaces in the wake of those woeful Euros.

We’ve watched them go from a defensive shambles at home to Poland, to throwing it away late on in Lisbon, to VAR denying us a late leveller in Zagreb, to reducing Ronaldo to a blubbering mess as we picked up our first point.

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And finally to a place where we were good enough to beat a side with the credentials of Modric and Co.

Across these five matches, over 74 days, we’ve also seen the re-emergence of Clarke from the bunker he inhabited in Germany, back into a frame of mind where he believes in himself and his players again.

On Monday night, we need all of this hard-earned self-esteem, and all this refound optimism to come together, in a display and a victory that sends us into the next challenge feeling a hell of a lot better than we did as we stumbled away from the last one.

Robertson’s key to that. As he draws level with Darren Fletcher in the cap-winning Hall Of Fame, as he homes in on Jim Leighton’s 91 and even King Kenny’s 102, he has to produce 90-plus minutes way more in keeping with that status.

In Warsaw, he needs to remember who he is and how he got here.

If that happens, all those who look up to him will raise their own game that extra ten per cent too.

Do that and we give ourselves more than a decent chance.

And that’s a lot more than we thought we had 74 days ago.

IF ever there was a story that confirmed the SPFL’s utter impotence as an organisation fit to run our domestic leagues, it’s surely that of the Bonnyrigg Rose points deduction.

Right now in our top flight, we have clubs whose fans are hell-bent on setting stadiums alight, whose stands ring weekly to sectarian bile, a club whose director of football has quit amid allegations of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ towards a player, and a club who parted company with three players for off-field behaviour.

Yet what does it take to rouse Neil Doncaster and Co from their slumbers?

A part-time League Two outfit with a sloping pitch.

In case you’ve missed it, Bonnyrigg have been docked six points after failing to keep a promise made on elevation to the senior ranks last season that they would replace their wonky grass with an artificial surface.

To this, they hold up their hands. They are bang to rights and they know it.

Here’s my question, though — is not playing on a bowling green really this much of an offence?

And if so, why didn’t Dundee lose points last season over a mudheap that forced five games to be postponed?

In that instance, the SPFL actually brought in a drainage expert to sort Dens Park out, which makes me wonder why they couldn’t have worked with Bonnyrigg rather than hammering them.

Or even let them have a quirky pitch, the way Hibs did in their heyday or Motherwell had until a few years ago.

Well, maybe I’m too cynical about these things. But it feels to me like the answer’s simple, it’s easy to come up with rules that batter wee clubs who can’t afford to fight back, and who don’t have the clout to commandeer the headlines.

But it takes balls to square up to the bigots and pyromaniacs. And the SPFL has long since been a cojone-free zone.

THAT excuse for a fight between lumbering 58-year-old Mike Tyson and YouTube weirdo Jake Paul didn’t do much to advance the reputation of boxing in particular or sport in general.

But hey, the ear-biting, woman-thumping rapist lost. So at least that’s some sort of victory for the human race.