At the time of Clarke’s appointment in May 2019, Scotland were looking for someone who could do one principal thing – get the country back to a major men’s tournament for the first time since 1998. <\/p>\n
That has been achieved, multiple times. So the remit for his successor will be to build on that success in qualifying for three finals by reaching the knockout phase.<\/p>\n
Clearly that is easier said than done. Clarke has done a magnificent job in galvanising the squad and the country, developing a much-lauded club-like spirit, which has certainly played a role in qualification success. <\/p>\n
That is something that must be fostered while evolving the make-up of a squad that was one of the oldest at the World Cup.<\/p>\n
But something else is required. Clarke was a pragmatist at heart and, although he set the team up in a more attacking formation in the win over Haiti, in particular, it never truly felt like the shackles were off.<\/p>\n
Should the next manager be someone with a more attacking ethos? You feel that would be welcomed by fans, many of whom have despaired at exiting consecutive Euros and now a World Cup without really laying a glove on the opposition.<\/p>\n
“This has been a special, special group. And he’s got the best out of them,” said former Scotland winger Pat Nevin, a close friend of Clarke.<\/p>\n
“But a lot of them are not going to last. I know these days 40 seems young for a World Cup player. In reality, that’s not the way it is, though. <\/p>\n
“It’s not obvious who the next group of players are. So whoever comes in, it’s actually a bit of a monster job to do.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the time of Clarke’s appointment in May 2019, Scotland were looking for someone who could do one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-765814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}