Scotland will face Bolivia for the first time but Clarke was faced with more questions about group rivals Haiti, following their 4-0 thumping of New Zealand on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
He was quick to highlight that some fans \u201chave a terrible habit of looking at these nations and thinking they are not very good or looking at where they are ranked in the world.<\/p>\n
“They play in a different section of the world, so maybe in their section they’re really good,” said Clarke. “They were much better than New Zealand.<\/p>\n
“I was never under any illusion that it was going to be a tough game. It’s probably nice that some people got to see how they played, because they now know it’s going to be a difficult game for us.”<\/p>\n
That is why Clarke – who outlined his priorities for Saturday as “no injuries, performance, result” – was quick to stress that this weekend’s game would be a \u201cstraightforward selection\u201c with the main event looming large.<\/p>\n
He added there are no “major” injury concerns, just a few players with “little grumbling things”.<\/p>\n
“Some players need minutes,” the head coach said. “I need to see one or two players in positions on the pitch and then we’ve got a week to prepare for the first game.<\/p>\n
“There’s no trying to protect players or whatever, injuries, unfortunately, are part and parcel of football. We don’t expect any, but you never know.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scotland will face Bolivia for the first time but Clarke was faced with more questions about group rivals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-624092","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\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624092","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=624092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}