Scotland v Russia: Hampden test will show if Steve Clarke has Scots believing

By Tom EnglishBBC Scotland
Scotland fans in Belgium
Steve Clarke takes charge of his third Scotland game when they face Russia at Hampden

The financial gulf between Kilmarnock and the Glasgow giants at Celtic Park and Ibrox is as wide as the River Clyde. And yet in his time at Rugby Park, Steve Clarke found a way to narrow the gap.

Clarke's team beat Celtic twice and Rangers four times. In an era of unprecedented domestic dominance under Brendan Rodgers, Clarke still managed to get a result in 57% of his games against the treble treble winners. Against Rangers, that figure shot upwards to 73%.

Inheriting a demoralised team and a support that only raised its voice to vent fury at its board, Clarke turned it around with his formidable amalgam of coaching intelligence and motivational brilliance. There was an honesty and a clarity about the way he went about his business that worked with his players, who would have readily run through a brick wall for him.

Those heroics, though, served only as a warm-up act. If performing footballing miracles is his thing, then he's into the main event now. Having broken down that weary fatalism at Rugby Park he's now got to do it all over again at Hampden. He has better players, but less time. On Friday, he's got 90 minutes to keep alive Scotland's paper-thin hopes of becoming a contender in Euro 2020 Group I.

When Clarke sends his team out to play Russia at Hampden on Friday, you probably wouldn't need both hands to count the number of people who believe Scotland will win. Optimism is one thing - there may be a bit of that on the back of Clarke's underdog exploits at Kilmarnock - but expectation is another. Scotland rarely expects anything these days.

Scratching a six-year itch

It's something he addressed on Thursday. It's been six years since Scotland delivered a victory in a game of this magnitude against an opponent of this quality. Six long, long years since they put away Croatia [twice] in the qualification for the 2014 World Cup. Even with those victories, though, there has to be an asterisk.

When Scotland beat Croatia for the first time in that group they were already miles out of the running for qualification having already played six games and having failed to win any of them. After the home draws against Serbia and Macedonia that kicked off the campaign, they then lost four in a row to Wales, Belgium, Wales again and Serbia. The win over Croatia was a terrific result, but it didn't matter. It was welcome but in the grand scheme of things both of those victories were irrelevant.

Group I

The last time Scotland turned over a major nation while still being in the hunt for qualification was a dozen years ago when James McFadden launched the rocket in Paris that beat the French. That same month, John 'Smeato' Smeaton set about some would-be terrorists at Glasgow airport and became a national hero and Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister. The point being that it's a long time ago since Scotland was a proper challenger.

Since the Croatia victories, Scotland have not once managed to upset the established order. In that time, in competitive games, Wales have beaten Belgium twice and Russia once, the Republic of Ireland have beaten Italy and Germany, Albania have won in Portugal, Slovakia have beaten Spain, Northern Ireland turned over Russia and Luxembourg turned over Northern Ireland.

They've come close, of course. Scotland were on the cusp of victory against Robert Lewandowski's Poland but conceded an equaliser four minutes into added time. They would have beaten Harry Kane's England had the striker not scored three minutes into added time. Winning games that you're not expected to win brings momentum. Clarke has another chance on Friday night.

'Clarke gets players to perform above themselves'

At Kilmarnock, he said that his players revelled in giving bigger clubs a bloody nose. His capacity to get those types of performances out of the same players who'd been toiling desperately before he arrived is the reason he'll be standing in the manager's place at Hampden.

Clarke is a steely individual with a proven record of getting players to perform above themselves against more illustrious opponents. Football can be a complicated game but some old methods still have a place in the new world and you can almost hear the manager pressing those motivational buttons in the team room. 'Nobody is expecting you to beat Russia. Nobody thinks you're good enough. Russia are expecting to come here and win. What are you gonna do about it?'

If Scotland were to beat Russia then it would definitely go down as a first victory against expectation since Croatia six years ago. The visitors are not among the true elite - Belgium's arrival in Glasgow on Monday will remind us what the really big boys look like - but they're a formidable unit with pockets of world class in Valencia's Denis Cheryshev and Zenit's Artem Dzyuba.

Between them they've scored 18 goals in Russia's past 13 games. Cheryshev scored against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Croatia at their own World Cup last summer. Dzyuba scored against the Saudis, the Egyptians and the Spanish in the same tournament. Their form line in the group shows them putting nine on San Marino and four on Kazakhstan but also it shows them losing 3-1 in Belgium and only beating Cyprus 1-0.

Scotland manager Steve Clarke watches his players at training
Steve Clarke hopes his Scotland side can gain momentum by claiming some famous scalps

On Friday night, the Scottish national football and rugby teams are playing. The crowd at Murrayfield, where an under-strength home team are hosting lowly Georgia, will far exceed the crowd at Hampden, despite the football being a must-win qualifier.

Through years of failure, Scotland fans have come to look on the concept of hope as a plot to mess with their heads. Clarke's record provides that hope can lead to something more tangible, but there's only one way to turn it into something meaningful and that's by taking scalps and building confidence, by instilling in the Scotland players that same redoubtable spirit that took his Kilmarnock team to places nobody thought them capable of reaching.

No matter who they were playing, last season's Killie threw back the shoulders and gave all-comers the evil stare. They believed. Friday will tell us a bit more about how much progress Clarke is making in his new job, not just on the football side but also on the psychological.