Steve Clarke will take a moment to celebrate a significant achievement when Belarus visit Hampden Park on Sunday. It will be game 72 in office for Clarke, surpassing Craig Brown as Scotland’s longest-serving manager in terms of matches.
Clarke’s big picture involves World Cup qualification, with Scotland in a strong position, but he can appreciate his longevity. “I’d be a bit daft if I wasn’t proud because I’m the first guy to reach that amount of games,” he said. “It’s nice, but that’s a little personal thing at the moment. It shouldn’t be about me. It’s about the team and it’s about trying to get to the World Cup so that’s what we’re going to focus on.
“The brief was to qualify for tournaments. We’ve managed to do that twice, but we want to do it again because we’re all greedy. The expectation was to do as well as I could. I’ve always looked at the players and you’re thinking: ‘What can we do to improve?’ Did I think it would last this long? Probably not, but here I am.”
Scotland’s win over Greece on Thursday means they trail Denmark on goal difference in Group C. With matches in Athens and at home to the Danes to come, Clarke will be hoping for a comfortable evening against Belarus. Denmark put six past them on Thursday but Clarke said his squad cannot be complacent. “If you want to qualify, these are the games you have to win,. You have to give yourself a platform to play against the bigger nations. If you drop points to the teams ranked below you, it makes qualification very difficult. If you look at our barren years, maybe we messed up against opposition we felt we should have been beating.
“In my tenure we’ve done well against the so-called lesser teams in the groups and it’s very important you get the points off these teams. It’s very important we get the points off Belarus. They’ll come here, they’ll be organised, they’ll be difficult to break down and until you break them down it’s a long night.
“They’ll make it difficult but it’s up to us to make sure that we approach the game properly, which we will. It’s up to us to make sure that we create enough chances in the game to get the crowd excited, which we hopefully will. The crowd need to back the players, the players need to give the crowd something to shout about and that’s what we’ll try to achieve.”
