It isn’t easy being Ralston says Bill Leckie – Celtic man sums Clarke’s Scots up

IT takes courage to be Anthony Ralston.

To keep going out there and giving 90 minutes for your country when you’re barely getting a kick for your club.

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To sit freezing on the bench at Dingwall or Perth one week, then be taking a roasting from a Musiala, a Shaqiri or a Leao the next. 

To constantly hear people saying that you’re simply not good enough.

If ever a player could be excused for throwing a sickie next time a Scotland squad was named, it’s surely Celtic’s second choice right-back.

Yet every time Clarke calls, he’s there. Whoever’s running at him, he’s working his tail off to stop them. Never shirking, never making excuses.

So a special mention to him for his performance here, as dogged and determined as it gets.

His gaffer had admitted we had to get absolutely everything right to have a chance against opposition this good – and I didn’t see Ralston get much wrong.

He closed down, he blocked, he got his head on crosses, he cleared his lines.

He was solid, dependable, a great team-mate to those around him.

First half, he was looking into the eyes of £35million PSG wide man Nuno Mendes.

On the hour, he was reunited with Rafael Leao of AC Milan, who’d given him a torrid one in Lisbon last month.

He never once backed down against either. He never once got left in their wake.

As the clock ticked down and the game hung in the balance, he still had the energy to hammer into opposition territory and deliver a cross that was just beyond Scott McTominay’s big toe.

For me, on a night full of displays to be proud of, Ralston’s was right up there.

In many ways, he actually epitomises everything Clarke’s asking the nation to believe in right now – that we’re learning on the hoof, that we’re growing from game to game, that having to punch above our weight this often is the preparation we need for a crack the World Cup he so desperately want to lead us into.

It’s not easy to put your faith in all of that, not when the stats are there for all to see: 

Ten defeats, five draws and just one measly win in our last 16.

On Friday night in Zagreb, the night before it went to one win in 15, I Clarke at what point on this unprecedented run he’d wake up and see himself as a man who needs to get a win.

His reply was very much on-brand:

“That’s for other people to decide.”

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You’d guess that by “other people” he meant the blazers at the SFA and that the decision they might have to make one day is whether he’s still the right man for the job.

If they truly believe in Clarke’s ability to drag us out of this slump of all slumps and get us motoring into the qualifiers looming in the spring, I suggest they come out and say so right now so fans and players alike know where we stand.

But if they’re at all unsure, if they’re wavering, if their bottle’s even beginning to tinkle?

Then logic dictates that the time to make a change would be now, while a new guy still has time to make a difference.

That’s certainly how it’d happen in club football, where any manager with one win in 16 – and that a sluggish 2-0 against a team of joiners and taxi drivers – must have compromising photographs of the chairman in a safe somewhere.

Before this double-header, I’d have said the scales were tipping away from Clarke.

He’d dug himself into a trench of negativity off the back of our miserable Euros, he was hiding from the media and the Tartan Army.

I’ll be honest, he came across as a man starring in a movie about the end of days.

What happened in Croatia at the weekend began to change things, though. His demeanour was much more positive, he spoke much more openly, he reacted to defeat much more bullishly.

Now, against the Portuguese, we saw his boys – decimated, remember, by more injuries that at any previous point in his reign – hold their own, fight their corner and even blow a golden chance to turn our first point of this Nations League group into three.

In Lisbon, seven minutes in, a ball had been rolled back to Andy Robertson for a cross that McTominay rose to bullet home.

Here, after just four, a carbon copy of the move ended with the Napoli man nodded straight at keeper Diogo Costa.

Listen, who knows what might have happened from there.

Maybe we’d just have poked the beast and Ronaldo and Fernandes would have got the finger out rather than posing about like divas all night.

What we do know is that whatever they threw at us from then on, we repelled it, right down to Craig Gordon’s point-blank stop from Fernandes four minutes from time and Nicky Devlin’s tremendous block from Leao’s volley as it all got a bit chaotic.

The Aberdeen man had come with eight to go, Ralston going off in front of the North Stand and trudging leg-weary all the way round to the dugouts.

Applause rang in his ears,

What a sound it must have been, what a feeling.

But boy, had he earned it.

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