England vs Scotland: The spectacular fall and fall of the Tartan Army's once great team

The current Scottish national team finds itself far away from the glories of their forefathers

Scotland's Grant Hanley reacts to the draw with Lithuania at Hampden Park (Getty)

It is a measure of Scottish football’s current clutching at straws that the nation’s great new footballing hope is a 15-year-old Rangers academy player who was being described last week at potentially the tartan equivalent of Andres Iniesta.

Billy Gilmour’s certainly got talent, though the presence of a Barcelona scout to see the midfielder play in Scotland’s under-16s’ win over Northern Ireland in the Victory Shield – the schoolboys’ equivalent of the Home International championships, in which England no longer compete – seems to require a sense of perspective. That certainly goes for another young player being spoken of in the same bracket: Karamoko Dembele - the 13-year-old of Ivorian parentage who has played for Celtic’s under-20s.

This desperate search for a hero has become part and parcel of following the national team, whose build-up to Friday night’s World Cup qualifier with England at Wembley was dominated on Tuesday by the observation by Stoke City’s Charlie Adam that manager Gordon Strachan is “not picking the right players” and that his own face “doesn’t fit.”

Adam is out in the cold and therefore biased, though considering he has more Premier League games than any candidate bar captain Darren Fletcher, his absence does seem odd. Adam had every reason to bang his head against a brick wall when Strachan called up Charlie Mulgrew, who has barely featured at Blackburn Rovers, a club second bottom of England’s Championship. Mulgrew has long been a favourite of ‘WGS’ (‘wee Gordon Strachan’) as the manager is known north of the border, while those out in the cold also number Middlesbrough’s Jordan Rhodes and Aston Villa’s Ross McCormack. Oliver Burke, the 19-year-old who left Nottingham Forest for RB Leipzig in search of a move, has also been in and out of a Scottish team who struggled to a last-ditch home draw against Slovenia and were then spanked in Slovakia, last time out.

That selection controversies should involve Championship players explains the fall and fall of a national team who once laughed in England’s face but who few fancy to win on Friday. The Scots won three out of four of the Battle of Britain clashes between 1974 and 1976, gracing the West Germany and Argentina World Cups in 1974 and 1978 while England stayed at home. Scottish players dominated English club football at that time and Scottish club football was immensely competitive. All that is a distant memory.

Law was mobbed by a fan after the famous 1967 win at Wembley (Getty)

There is no better illustration of how much richer the Scottish club player’s stock once was than the starting XI which achieved the legendary 3-2 win over Sir Alf Ramsey’s world champions in April 1967. That England side - arguably the best ever – were world champions and entered the game on the back of 19 consecutive wins. But the Scots fielded four players who would win the European Cup with Celtic a few months later and two had been Cup Winners’ Cup runners-up with Rangers, the previous summer. Their English league contingent included Leeds United’s Billy Bremner and Manchester United’s Denis Law. The pattern continued. A Scottish triumvirate of Dalglish, Souness and Hansen would become the lynchpins of the Liverpool team which dominated the late 1970s and much of the 1980s.

The Scottish league was not only more broadly competitive, with Aberdeen, Dundee United and Hearts challenging the Old Firm, but a source of overwhelming interest. St Johnstone were attracting 20,000 and Rangers well over 100,000 when Jim Baxter was doing his keepie-uppies during that extraordinary 1967 win at Wembley.

Yet the nation’s struggle to keep up is more complicated than a dying of the light in club stadiums. Scotland – who with the arguable exception of Fletcher have not delivered a world class talent since Souness - are seemingly unable to establish a system to help develop new talent which must surely be there in the streets Glasgow. Scottish Football Association (SFA) performance director Brian McClair, who was recruited to much acclaim from Manchester United to revamp the nation’s academy system, quit in July after just 17 months in office - the second performance director to quit in two years. The Scots still seek a successor.

The biggest bout of soul-searching over the drift to a current 42nd in the world rankings came when Iceland (population: 333,000) qualified for the European Championships and Scotland (population: 5.3m) were the only home nation left behind.

Strachan's side have made a poor start to their World Cup qualifying campaign (Getty)

SFA chief executive Stewart Regan visited Iceland to find out why, before the tournament, and the Icelanders’ joint manager Heimir Hallgrimsson was invited to hold court in Glasgow. There was an answer of sorts in the Scots’ relative lack of investment in coaching and facilities. Iceland was found to have more than twice as many full-size indoor pitches as Scotland, 150 indoor domes with part-sized pitches, and approximately one Uefa A or B qualified coach for every 51 players (amateur and professional) compared with one for 218 in Scotland.

The achievements of Martin O’Neill and Michael O’Neill with the Irish nations reveal there is far more to it than coaches and pitches. The same goes for Wales, though Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey’s presence at the heart of that team also makes it one of those freak generations. What the other small home nations and Iceland revealed this summer was the importance of going into these occasions with a very specific plan, enabling them to bridge the deficit in technical ability. Everyone fights to carry out that plan. This is where Scotland seem lacking.

Though the atmosphere around the camp is generally bright – in part the same players tend to be picked – ‘WGS’ did not look like a man with a plan when he sat down to talk at Hampden Park last week. “For all the years I have been a manager, you can never really plan it,” he said. “We all talk about tactics and plans. You can say: ‘For the first 15 minutes we will do this, for the next 20 we’ll do that’. It doesn’t really work that way. Somebody scores a freak goal after 15 minutes and it blows everything. It never works out the way that you plan it. There are a couple of things you can do that can help you. But generally it is down to players and how far they want to jump in the air, sprint, or how brave they want to be on the ball.”

Strachan and Gareth Southgate have both been asked in the past week if they felt they were doing an ‘impossible job.’ It seemed significant that Southgate rejected the notion, while Strachan said ‘yes.’ It had been impossible “for a long time now,” he said. “You think: ‘Well, we disappointed as a group. How do we make it better?’ What a chance to make it better.’”

The match at Wembley brings both managers to a possible endgame, though Southgate has considerably more reasons for optimism. Strachan is the one clutching at straws.