On the touchline, Clarke had words with his assistant Steven Naismith.<\/p>\n
“How are we level, Naisy?” asked Clarke.<\/p>\n
“No idea, gaffer,” replied Naismith.<\/p>\n
“It’s a miracle, Naisy,” said the manager,<\/p>\n
“Give us six numbers for the lotto, boss,” said Naismith.<\/p>\n
That exchange didn’t happen, of course, because when the two men came side-by-side, the pair of them seemed lost for words as Hampden convulsed all around them. A draw? “We’ll take it and do the arithmetic later.”<\/p>\n
There was more to come, naturally. Karetsas and Konstantelios appeared and acres of space appeared down Scotland’s right. <\/p>\n
Greece started to gather themselves and look dangerous again. And that’s when Scotland made it two. A free-kick, a scramble, a Lewis Ferguson poke, and the lead.<\/p>\n
This was football as fiction. No, science fiction. <\/p>\n
Into added time we went. Karetsas forced a brilliant save from Gunn in the 91st minute. Have you ever seen 45,000 people roar with happiness while simultaneously calling for oxygen masks?<\/p>\n
And have you ever seen anything as ludicrous, as preposterous, as jaw-droppingly hilarious as a third Scottish goal going in at the end? A present. Big Lyndon Dykes ripped off the gift-wrapping and launched his shot into the roof of the Greek net.<\/p>\n
Scotland drive on, somehow. They have Belarus on Sunday, a game they are hot favourites to win. Belarus got annihilated by Denmark on Thursday. <\/p>\n
In pulling off this Houdiniesque act of escapology, Clarke’s team produced the strange feat of stunning a stadium into delirium. Three good results on the board. Three more and it’s Hollywood, baby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the touchline, Clarke had words with his assistant Steven Naismith. “How are we level, Naisy?” asked Clarke.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-189455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}