Midfielder Kenny McLean believes the experience against high-calibre opposition will stand Scotland in good stead before this summer’s World Cup.<\/p>\n
The Scots have been drawn in Group C with Haiti, Morocco and Brazil.<\/p>\n
They take on Ivory Coast at Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium on Tuesday in the second of their March friendlies.<\/p>\n
“A disappointing result. It’s good to get these challenges, we’re trying to prepare as well as we can for a big summer ahead,” said Norwich City’s McLean.<\/p>\n
“We’ll try to get better and that’s what we’ll try to do again on Tuesday. The shape was decent enough at times.<\/p>\n
“The second half was a bit better out of possession, but I think we could have been a bit more threatening at the top end of the pitch.<\/p>\n
“Japan are a really good team, they press you really well, but that’s what we’re going to come up against in the summer.<\/p>\n
“There’s an expectation now and we want those expectations on us. We want to reach a new level.”<\/p>\n
Despite the positive noises from Clarke, former Scotland striker Billy Dodds says Scotland have to improve on Tuesday and then again before they head across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
After the Ivory Coast fixture, Scotland will play Curacao on 30 May and one other unnamed opponent before the World Cup. <\/p>\n
“The boys trying to push their way in will be most frustrated because they need a team to perform to their best,” Dodds said.<\/p>\n
“We must get a win at some point to get momentum and maybe that’s why we’ve chosen Curacao as the last fixture at home. But I would like us to play better against Ivory Coast and solve a few problems.<\/p>\n
“We’re down because there was nothing for the crowd to get up for. It was flat. There was industry and effort but no X-factor.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Midfielder Kenny McLean believes the experience against high-calibre opposition will stand Scotland in good stead before this summer’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-501311","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501311","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=501311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}