Players' commitment impresses Scotland boss Steve Clarke ahead of friendly double-header

Scotland boss Steve Clarke has praised his players’ commitment ahead of the upcoming international friendlies, saying many could have made excuses to miss the games.

The national team face Iceland at Hampden on Friday before travelling to play Liechtenstein on Monday.

The friendlies are the last chance Clarke has to put his players through their paces before the crucial World Cup qualifiers later in the year.

Reporting for international duty when some players have been through a gruelling campaign with their clubs is a demonstration of commitment to the cause, and the head coach took pride in that.

“The biggest thing for me is that everybody’s turned up,” Clarke said. “I think that’s great.

“We’ve come to the end of a long, hard season, a lot of them could have had little excuses or little niggles.

“There’s one or two in the camp now that are still getting rid of little niggles from the end of the season, but they’re all here and they all want to play, and that’s great for me.

“Since I came here, this group of players have always said that they are so committed to coming and performing for their country. Every time I pick a squad, they all want to be here.

“One or two of them have called me up in this camp that haven’t been selected, asking me to select them! But if they’re not quite fit, then obviously I can’t do that.”

Clarke’s squad has evolved over his six years in the job and while a core group of players has gained experience over time, the manager has also recognised the need to bring a freshness to the squad with a number of younger players, including Connor Barron, Lennon Miller and Keiron Bowie, in the group for these matches.

That doesn’t mean wholesale changes to the team and an experimental side for the friendlies but Clarke has an eye on the future and helping players develop at international level.

“You know me well by now, I don’t really experiment too much,” he said. “I think the process with any team, especially a national team, is there has to be a cycle, there has to be a turnover of players eventually.

“People make a lot of the seven uncapped players in the squad. But you’re bringing these young players in to feel the level of the group, to understand where they need to get to, to be selected regularly for the national team.

“It’s important not to discard the ones that have been relatively successful over certainly my six years in charge and make sure that there’s always a little production line of players coming through that we can rely on in the future.”

One experienced player who is likely to feature on Friday is Kieran Tierney, who will earn his 50th cap for his country.

“Obviously, he’s shown his worth,” Clarke said. “His career shows he’s a top, top player. We’re lucky to have him.

“In recent years, he’s had one or two little injury issues that’s probably restricted his number of caps. He’s one of those players that we identified very early.

“I remember going down to London to meet him. He’d just moved to Arsenal to speak to him about his role within the squad and what we expected from him. Since then, we’ve had a really good relationship. We should be grateful that we’ve got him.

“It doesn’t stop at 50 and the caps keep coming. That’s what I set out to do, to cap a number of players that would be the core of the squad moving forward.

“So many players in the squad now that are over 50. Kieran’s just another one to add to that.”

While performance and preparation for competitive games in the upcoming qualifying campaign will be the priority, Clarke is also keen on results after conceding Scotland’s record in friendlies is “not very good”.

He said: “It’s funny, I was at a couple of functions recently with Gordon Strachan and we were talking about it. We were trying to work out why it would be that the record in friendly football is so poor.

“It would be nice to make it, it would be nice to improve that record a little bit in the next two games. But why it happens, I’m not quite sure.

‘Obviously, in friendly football you get a chance to make six substitutions and the feeling is that you should make those six substitutions. So sometimes that can disrupt the rhythm of the team a little bit.

“I’m thinking last year when we were travelling home to Finland, it was a game that we had at home really and then you make changes and the game sort of drifts away from you a little bit.

“So that could be one thing that affects it. But it would be nice to make the record a little bit better.”