Japan head coach Hajime Moriyasu was impressed by Scott McTominay’s heroics as Scotland beat Denmark 4-2 in November to reach the World Cup.<\/p>\n
The Napoli midfielder scored a spectacular overhead kick to open the scoring before Lawrence Shankland, Kieran Tierney and Kenny McLean also got on the scoresheet on a famous Hampden night.<\/p>\n
And while Moriyasu singled out McTominay and Scotland captain Andy Robertson for praise, he expects a tough test against a team of “high intensity”.<\/p>\n
“Andy Robertson, especially, is a player who plays at the top level and also Scott McTominay,” Moriyasu said, via a translator.<\/p>\n
“I remember his goal in the World Cup qualifier \u2013 an overhead kick which was brilliant.<\/p>\n
“But it’s not just those two players, Scotland has many players I admire.<\/p>\n
“We are competing against a team of World Cup standard. They are very dynamic in defence and offence as well, they play with a high intensity as well.<\/p>\n
“So we are looking forward to playing against a team who is of this level.<\/p>\n
“In the game, I want to see where we stand in the whole thing and how much we can express our quality.<\/p>\n
“It’s a pleasure to be here, to play against an opponent who has a long history of football.<\/p>\n
“Tomorrow’s game is going to be tough but we’d like to work on our tactics before the World Cup.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japan head coach Hajime Moriyasu was impressed by Scott McTominay’s heroics as Scotland beat Denmark 4-2 in November…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-500411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500411","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=500411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}