Kenny McLean: Scotland players are ‘desperate’ to win against Croatia

Kenny McLean admits Scotland’s players are “desperate” to end their current winless run, and believes they can do that against Croatia on Saturday.

The national team have won just once in their last 14 games, a victory in a friendly against Gibraltar, and followed a disappointing Euros campaign with defeats to Poland and Portugal.

McLean is part of the squad assembled to face Croatia in Zagreb and then take on Portugal again at Hampden next week, and he conceded that recent results had been tough as Scotland have competed at a major finals and are now in the top tier of the Nations League.

“We’ll keep working as hard as we can to get these results,” McLean said. “We’re up against really good opposition.

“That’s where we want to be, we’ve worked hard to get there. It’s somewhere we want to be, pitting ourselves against the best.

“The next step is to start getting these results, we’re desperate for them.”

The Norwich midfielder insisted that defeats aren’t “brushed under the carpet” and that improvement would come from building on what the team does well. He acknowledged that Croatia would be strong opponents this weekend but said the squad wasn’t heading to Zagreb without confidence they could bring back three points.

“We’ll go to Croatia with the belief that we can get a result,” McLean said. “If not, we’d be as well staying back here.

“Croatia are a strong team, they always have been. So, it’s going to be tough, we know that.

“We need to keep learning from the games we’ve played against these top nations.

“We don’t want to just stop there; we want to push ourselves again to compete at this level.

“It’s not enough to just do well the previous year to get into this pot. We want to keep improving and start getting results against these nations because that’s the next step for us.

“I don’t think anybody wants to be suffering at this level. We are against good opposition, but we’ve got good players, we’re a good team.”