Scotland must turn their Kazakhstan shame on San Marino, says coach

It was, as assistant coach Peter Grant freely admitted, not good enough. The fallout from Scotland’s calamitous 3-0 defeat by Kazakhstan – a side ranked 117th in the world who failed to win a match while trying to qualify for the 2018 World Cup – raged long into the night back home.

One newspaper superimposed an image of the manager, Alex McLeish, on the toilet with headline “Down the Kazi!” on its back page.

Yet while the kindest of observers were noting Scotland’s next match in San Marino – rated the worst team on the planet – on Sunday means “it’s probably just as well they’re not coming back for a while”, the players were being challenged to respond to one of the most humiliating results in the country’s history by winning convincingly in Serravalle.

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“They have to make a statement, it’s not about looking to. They have to do it,” said Grant, the former Norwich manager who joined the coaching staff last year along with the former Everton striker James McFadden.

“It doesn’t matter who you play, you have to earn it. There are no givens in any match. You have to earn everything you get. The players are disappointed and as a staff we are gutted, because it wasn’t the performance we expected from this group of players.”

Scotland were two goals down within 10 minutes in Astana against a team who had won only three of their previous 40 competitive matches, although McLeish refused to give up on qualification in a group that also contains Belgium and Russia. Grant admitted that to stand any chance of achieving that goal they must improve at the back.

“We were caught with two sucker punches, a ball in between us where a runner has come from midfield. We said that would happen and that’s exactly what they did,” he said.

“And the second goal started from a simple thing like a throw-in. If you don’t do the small details that we spoke about, it doesn’t matter what level you are playing at, you can be punished.”

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Grant added: “People say it’s the easiest thing in the world to defend –we proved it’s not, because you have to defend as a group and that comes right from the front. We didn’t do that well enough. Against the ball we weren’t good enough and with the ball we weren’t good enough, and if you have that combination you are not going to win games of football. So we have to put it right against San Marino, we have to win the game, and it has to be a much better performance.”

Their opponents go into the game on the back of a 5-0 defeat in Cyprus, while Chelsea’s Eden Hazard scored twice as Belgium beat Russia 3-1 in Brussels.

Having now failed to qualify for a major tournament for more than two decades, Scotland’s task was always going to be a difficult one against two teams who reached the quarter-finals at last year’s World Cup and despite being without six of the players who started in the Nations League victories against Albania and Israel in November, Grant acknowledged their replacements had found it hard to respond against Kazakhstan.

“We played too safe at times,” he said. “We passed the ball slowly and across instead of in between or beyond. We talked about that because that happened in Israel as well. That was a massive problem we had in Israel, we played too slowly, we played back too often, we played square too often, and it happened again. So we are really disappointed in that because that was one thing we harped on about.”

Amid calls for McLeish to be sacked just a year after replaced Gordon Strachan, Charlie Adam was among those who took a different tack. “I don’t think it’s a sacking offence,” the Stoke midfielder said. “There’s a reason these type of nights happen and it was down to players not imposing themselves on the opposition. I like Alex as a manager and person, and the players let him down. They need to have a look at themselves.”