Scotland manager Steve Clarke admits he ‘s**t’ himself when Liam Cooper went down injured in the friendly win over Gibraltar, with the national team head coach on edge after a raft of withdrawals from his squad for the European Championships.
Cooper was taken off in the second half of Scotland’s 2-0 victory in Faro after coming off the bench at half time, and limped around the pitch to the dugouts, but Clarke is hoping that the knock he took to his knee isn’t serious enough to rule him out of the trip to Germany.
Having lost Aaron Hickey, Nathan Patterson, Lewis Ferguson, Jacob Brown and Lyndon Dykes to injury already, Clarke is now desperate to get through Friday’s final warm-up match against Finland on Friday without any further scares.
“I spoke to him straight after the game, it looks like a knee on knee collision,” Clarke said.
“Sore for a couple of days. Fingers crossed it should be fine.
“I s**t myself. Of course I was worried. Every time someone goes down, you get a collision, you stay down. You get some who try to pull the wool over the referee’s eyes, but Liam doesn’t stay down very often.
“I was trying to get a message down – obviously I watched the game from higher up [in the stand] – I was trying to get a message down to the bench saying any doubt, get him off. That’s what we did.”
Clarke will make a call in the next few days over whether or not to call up Scotland under-21 striker Tommy Conway to his squad as a replacement for the injured Dykes, with the Bristol City forward netting a goal tonight as Scot Gemmill’s side were edged out 2-1 against Turkey.
Scotland laboured to break the deadlock against Gibraltar, passing up a series of golden opportunities, and Clarke gave his strongest hint yet that he could look to Conway to give him another option at the top of the field.
“It was nice that Tommy scored,” he said.
“He is a good boy Tommy and he is certainly in my mind.
“I‘ve still got to sit down with John (Carver) and James (Morrison) and Austin (MacPhee) and Chris Woods and just have a little chat through and try to come up with something that will help us now going into this tournament. That’s for tomorrow.
“Can we replace Lyndon like for like? No. Would it have been a better performance with Lyndon in the team? Probably no, because they dealt very, very well with high balls into the box. They defended the box really well.
“So, we just need to find a little bit more craft from certain players on the pitch to unpick that type of defence.”
Despite the profligacy of his side, Clarke was pleased enough with the runout on a sticky surface at the Estadio Algarve, particularly after going seven games without a win prior to this friendly.
“We won,” he said.
“It has been a long time. Nice to win, nice to get a clean sheet obviously.
“I don’t think Zander (Clark) had too many touches of the ball. Maybe a dozen at most. We came here as a training exercise and created a lot of chances.
“What I would say, and I said this to the lads at half time, if we want to keep improving as a team when you create that number of chances in the first half, and good chances, you have to score them. That just takes the pressure off. It releases the tension around the place.
“We created…I stopped counting at six in the first half, what I would count as goal chances – not just chances, goals. A better ratio would have been two or three at half time and we can go out and play with a little more freedom in the second half.
“I told them not to panic at half time and they didn’t panic. We scored two good goals – well, one good goal, Che’s was a good goal, Ryan’s was a bit scrappy. But it was the kind of goal that was going to open the game up, or a set play.
“Maybe we have to be a little bit better from set plays, we created some chances, but not too much.”
Clarke meanwhile revealed that youngster Ben Doak had been left off the bench in Faro as a precaution.
“He has had a little reaction to the two training days, so we just decided not to risk him,” he said.
“Take him off the bench and there is no risk.”
