Day one at Scotland HQ, east of uptown Charlotte, and there’s a bunfight brewing – or to be more accurate, angry Norwegians are taking potshots at Steve Clarke, who, we can only surmise, couldn’t care less what the Norwegians think.<\/p>\n
Stale Solbakken, the Norway head coach, and Brede Hangeland, the team manager, have let fly in the media about a training game between the reserve players from the two countries that Clarke cancelled. <\/p>\n
Who knew that the ditching of a meaningless bounce match could spark such fury.<\/p>\n
“Unprofessional,” trumpeted Solbakken of his Scottish counterpart. “Embarrassing” and “weak” whinged Hangeland. <\/p>\n
Just before the Scotland news conference at their palatial Charlotte base camp, three Norwegian reporters fetched up in search of Scottish retaliatory thunder.<\/p>\n
What they got was a cool response from John McGinn, not just super with the ball at his feet but also pretty nifty with a microphone in front of his face.<\/p>\n
“I would say 75% of the [Scotland] squad haven’t seen it,” he said of the Norwegian anger, smiling as he spoke. <\/p>\n
“I did see it. Our job is to look after Scotland. Norway’s job is to look after Norway. And if they’ve done their research, we lost a very important part of the squad [in Billy Gilmour] very, very close to this camp.<\/p>\n
“It had a huge impact on everyone. We didn’t want to lose another. We had a few niggles, not everyone’s been training. <\/p>\n
“So I think it’s a professional way of handling things, to be perfectly honest, and look after number one. I’m sure every single country will be doing the exact same. <\/p>\n
“If Norway lost Erling Haaland or Martin Odegaard in one of the games leading up to Saturday, they would cancel the game as well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Day one at Scotland HQ, east of uptown Charlotte, and there’s a bunfight brewing – or to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":724399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-724398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/724399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}