Goal hero Ryan Christie says Scotland showed character in fight-back win

Ryan Christie netted the winner for Scotland against Republic of Ireland and said the victory was payback for the 3-0 loss in Dublin in June.

The visitors had taken the lead at Hampden through John Egan but Jack Hendry headed in an equaliser early in the second half before Christie stroked home a late penalty to put Scotland top of their Nations League group ahead of the final game in Krakow against Ukraine.

The attacker said the win was huge for plenty of reasons but said that the defeat in June had preyed on the players minds and was something they had wanted to “put right”.

“It’s a big win,” he told Premier Sports. “We came into the game desperate to win for a number of reasons.

“We wanted to come away from this camp with three wins, and we started on Wednesday with one.

“The bigger factor was what happened in the summer in Dublin, and we wanted to put that right. We felt we let ourselves down and let the fans down over there. We wanted to put that right and thankfully we did.

“It was frustrating after that game. It was a difficult summer. We all knew that and felt that when we came away from it and that’s why we wanted to flip it on its head this camp.”

Christie felt the players had shown their mettle in testing circumstances, with Ireland competitive from start to finish, and said they will take heart from showing a different performance to the on in the win against Ukraine days earlier.

“Two wins from two, we can’t really ask for more than that, and we’ll go again on Tuesday,” he said. “First half we found it kind of tough to control the game and to be fair they played well, like they did over there.

“We had to make a few tweaks at half time and second half we came out and showed a right bit of character.

“Even towards the end there we had all the boys defending, subs coming on and doing brilliant.

“Lots of confidence to take from this again and we go on to Tuesday now.”