Steve Clarke, clearly, isn’t one to be swayed by outside opinions.
During his Scotland tenure he has stuck firmly to his own mind when it comes to tactics and team selection, sometimes much to the national side’s benefit, and at others, to its detriment.
Take the demoralising defeat to Greece on Sunday night. On paper, a starting centre back in La Liga would seem to be a better bet than one who can’t get much of a look-in for a team in England’s third tier.
Similarly, when welcoming back one of the top-performing central midfielders in the English Premier League this season to your line-up, logic would seem to dictate that your English Championship man would be forced to sit out, allowing said midfielder to operate in the position in which he has flourished.
Certainly, if you also had another midfielder voted the best in all of Serie A last season, you might expect that he definitely wouldn’t instead be the man forced to make way. But then, as he has shown frequently in the past, Clarke is his own man.
And so it was that Ryan Christie looked woefully out of sorts having been dropped in on the right of the Scotland midfield, while Kenny McLean – who again, in fairness, played well in Greece – patrolled a more central area.
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The loyalty that Clarke shows to a core of players that he clearly trusts has at times been a major strength of his, and at others, a major flaw in his make-up. Greece manager Ivan Jovanovic made six changes to his team for the second leg of the Nations League relegation playoff, while Christie coming in for Lewis Ferguson was the only alteration Clarke made to his own starting XI. And it showed.
From the outside, Clarke’s stubborn streak can come across as frustrating intransigence. Instead of selecting players on their current form at club level, he often instead seems to select his personnel on what they have done previously in a Scotland jersey, sometimes many months or even years before.
And I fear, now, that this may well affect his legacy as Scotland manager.
Any discussion over Clarke’s position in the here and now is pointless. He will not be sacked, and given the fact he has led his nation to two major championships, despite his poor record once Scotland have got there, he will feel justifiably that he should be given the opportunity now to take his nation to a World Cup. And he will get that chance.
But given that Clarke has largely been a successful Scotland manager, and that his stalwarts like Andy Robertson and John McGinn have been wonderful servants for their country, it would be a huge shame if these relatively golden years for the national team were to close on a sour note.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to assessing Clarke’s legacy at this particular moment in time.
On the one hand, he is the man who ended Scotland’s two-decade wait for major tournament football, dragging the nation out of the international wilderness. He fostered a club atmosphere within the squad, all-but ended the call-off culture that had dogged those who went before him, and brought the Tartan Army back to Hampden in their droves.
On the other hand, his critics will rightly point out that it has never been easier to qualify for a European Championships. That Clarke has had the best group of Scottish players in a generation or two available to him, and that his conservative approach has stifled some of that talent.
Yes, he may have taken Scotland to two tournaments, but his record of two draws and four defeats once he has got there makes for woeful reading. What’s more, he failed to learn from his own mistakes from Euro 2020, repeating the same errors in Germany last summer. For many, his bafflingly cautious approach to the must-win game against Hungary when history was there to be made was a sackable offence on its own.
The truth is more of a nuanced, complex mix of both competing narratives. Whether the positive or negative slant wins out in the end when Clarke finally does leave his position – which he has left in little doubt will be whenever Scotland’s World Cup adventure ends – depends on how he approaches these qualifiers.
Do that, and he will have every chance of taking Scotland to the World Cup and cementing his reputation as one of the most successful national team managers of the modern era in the process.
If Clarke doubles down though on ignoring the form book in favour of the old guard, no matter their own travails at club level, then he risks not only his own Scotland legacy, but allowing yet another World Cup to pass us all by.
