Scotland owe nation performance after Germany defeat – Pat Nevin

Steve will be sensible but serious about what happened on Friday night.

He obviously knows these things better than I do, but I’d like to have had wee Billy Gilmour in there. These tournaments, it’s about keeping the ball, because if you give it away, you don’t get it back for five minutes, you end up chasing shadows.

When you play top technical teams, the one thing you must do is hold the ball. He’s our best.

Steve will go through every aspect of the game. Although I don’t think he’ll go through every technical mistake and bad pass, that’s not the problem.

We had a game plan that really, really, really didn’t work. So, when that’s happening, you think ‘right, let’s look at this’.

We ended up playing a 5-4-1 and it didn’t work for us. You can’t allow that to happen against the Swiss- and I don’t think Steve will. He’ll be thinking “how do I change it?”.

I mean, you get one sent off, but it was done before that. It was already looking like four, five or six.

Ryan Porteous will be disappointed because he let himself down.

It was a horrifying tackle. Hopefully I’m fair-minded enough that, when I saw the replay, I wanted him sent off. I don’t want to see a tackle like that happen to anyone.

The first thing he should do is apologise to Ilkay Gundogan. The red mist comes down and he does it out of desperation, but you can’t do that. Your team-mates are knackered now after chasing shadows.

It’s a big error, but did it make a huge difference? Probably not.