There are so many elephants in the room denoting a deep-rooted issue for Scotland that they’re blocking the TV; a blessing in disguise when the national team is playing.
Thursday’s game in Russia was further evidence of Steve Clarke’s experimentation, with Oliver Burke reclaiming the nominal striker’s jersey he inherited in defeat away to Belgium in June. The performance that day was much better than the 3-0 scoreline suggested, ending oxymoronically with something approaching hope for the Steve Clarke era. That game feels much, much longer than four months ago.
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Scotland, as you’re very likely aware, have a striker problem. In fact, they have several.
The Oli McBurnie problem is that he looks like a target man, he moves like a target man, but isn’t really a target man, better suited to passes into his feet to bring under control or flick on to runners. While he evidently didn’t play well against Russia at Hampden Park in September, he was hamstrung to an extent by Scotland treating him like the focal point he isn’t.
The problem with Matt Phillips is that he offers plenty of decent defensive work but little else. The issue with Steven Naismith and Steven Fletcher is that, while they can succeed as the lone striker, they are in their mid-thirties and in decline. Leigh Griffiths is enduring personal issues and isn’t a viable option right now.
And so, Burke the lone striker became a resurrected concept.
Although Burke was played up front at Brendan Rodgers’ Celtic last season during Odsonne Edouard’s spell out injured, scoring four goals within a month between the end of January and end of February, his form faded after the manager’s departure, and he largely found himself marginalised under Neil Lennon. On loan this season once more from West Brom, now to Alaves, he’s racked up one assist in 231 minutes in La Liga.
However, Clarke was clearly conscious of Burke’s unsuitability to the position, with the idea at the outset to see Burke gainfully supported rather than isolated.
In possession, Scotland resembled a 4-2-3-1, with those three advanced midfielders pushed so high they were tripping up on the back of Burke’s heels. Out of possession, they shifted to a 4-2-4, with John McGinn often operating even higher than Burke as the principal presser, and Robert Snodgrass (No 7) and Ryan Fraser (No 11) pushing on the passing lanes out wide. You can see this take shape below.
McGinn was bluntly ineffective in this defensively-minded shadow-striker position, which made Clarke’s decision to bench Ryan Christie, a natural in that role and in the form of his life (the red card against Livingston last weekend aside), all the more galling. Furthermore, with McGinn pushed up so high, it left John Fleck and Callum McGregor exposed when Russia broke the largely uncoordinated high press.
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Peculiarly, given both are usually inverted wingers, both Snodgrass on the left and Fraser on the right were played on the flanks corresponding to their favoured foot. Presumably, this was to stretch Russia’s full-backs but both Yuri Zhirkov (No 18) and Mario Fernandes (No 2) still pushed forward liberally, as you can see below.
Within the first five minutes, Burke’s heavy first touch bamboozled Aleksei Ionov and he broke down the left wing before losing the ball, but that brief, inadvertent moment of brilliance was Burke’s only ostensible contribution to the game.
Though long balls were resorted to less than in the reverse fixture, there was still little of a structured plan in advancing the ball upfield to Burke, who seemed to shapeshift between a conventional lone striker, a deeper false nine, or a secondary left-winger when Snodgrass moved inside. If he’d been given license to conduct himself that freely, then his trequartista impressionism might be vindicated; his being hooked at half-time suggests he hadn’t been.
Below is Burke’s touch map, with only one touch inside the box and a scattergun approach to build-up play outside it.
Burke is a good athlete, astonishingly quick and sturdily built, but his first touch, close control and decision-making are poor, and he doesn’t have hold-up or link-up play to even pass judgement. Repeatedly, Burke would be fed the ball in the final third with space to run into to create something and, repeatedly, he would run into traffic, ignoring a better option looking for a reverse pass or crossfield ball. His performance was essentially artless.
Dundee United’s Lawrence Shankland replaced Burke at half-time and, within the opening four minutes, displayed three excellent examples of hold-up play, including two crisp knockdowns to Fraser and Callum McGregor. There were sharp interchanges between the front six, with McGinn dropping slightly deeper than in the first half and Shankland now adroitly fulfilling the duties of a striker, which cruelly whispered the slightest hints of optimism.
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In characteristic fashion for Scotland, the relatively positive spell of possession which opened the second half crumbled with one flick of a massive Artem Dzyuba boot.
Two excellent Russian finishes preceded a third and fourth ready-made for Scotland’s scrapbook of cataclysmic defending. Shankland, so fleetingly bright, was left isolated as Scotland submitted to yet another mentally fragile collapse, yet another abject humiliation, yet another low point in a thick tome of low points covering the generation-wide gap since their last tournament qualification for the 1998 World Cup.
By the end, Shankland had only passed forward once — in his own half, such was his toiling in exile.
The Burke and Shankland experiments underline Clarke’s increasingly desperate scramble for solutions, any trace element of such, not so much scraping the barrel as fastidiously scanning its bottom with a microscope. Shankland exhibited atoms of solution, and warrants a start against San Marino on Sunday, but he was involved with too little action to infer anything conclusive.
Scotland’s striking crisis persists but as do all the others; and as they worsen and Scotland’s entropy on the pitch — and in pubs, living rooms and the terraces — threatens to deteriorate completely, those elephants in the room become a stampede.
(Photo: Joosep Martinson – UEFA via Getty Images)
