If Steve Clarke Is An Honourable Man, He Will Know That His Time Is Up.

There is no excuse for that. None. Not a single one. Not injuries, not a series of bad breaks, nothing. Scotland are out of the Euros with one point. The sniggering from certain quarters is fully justified. Once again, we’re the butt of jokes from Lapland to Latvia, and this time there is not even the benefit of a hard luck story to cheer us all up.

We needed a win. Which is why we spent much of the first half passing the ball from side to side when we weren’t passing it backwards.

The first series of substitutions was like-for-like nonsense. It does no good to bring on a penalty box player when you have quite literally not had a single sniff of the ball inside it. Anyone who thought that change would make a scintilla of difference has watched football without understanding it. It is one of the most senseless changes we could have made, and so of course the minute we heard Shankland was coming on I knew Che Adams was coming off for him.

The gung-ho substitutions, AKA the last throw of the dice for a desperate team, came as the clock was ticking down, and having spent far too many years watching Celtic do that in Europe the way it ended was grimly inevitable; with a swift break when we had too many committed forward and players in unfamiliar positions … and the loss of a late goal.

Watch the complete incoherence of the team in those last 20 minutes, the last ten of regulation time and the last ten added on.

Those in the media who thought that we should have benched Ralston and given his place to James Forrest saw exactly what that would have meant on Scotland’s left flank the second Clarke took off Robertson and stuck Kenny McLean – a central midfielder – out there instead.

Within moments, the Hungarians were in behind him. If players were just capable of playing anywhere you could just stick the best eleven technical footballers in your squad on the pitch and let them decide what they wanted to do.

How so-called “media professionals” can have spent years watching football without properly being able to understand the mechanics of it I do not know. That none of them feels the need to read even the most basic tactical guide is maddening. It’s evident that none of them has even booted up Football Manager just to see what all the fuss is about; they would not make some of the ludicrous comments they make if they simply understood a bit more.

I don’t know what the manager thinks he was watching over those three games. Here are two horrific stats for you to ponder.

Three games played. A grand total of four shots on target. Two goals scored. Both of them by opposing players putting the ball in their own net.

Anyone who wants to do an assessment of what went wrong should start there, and that has nothing to do with the personnel, although Scotland’s lack of an elite level striker is both painful from a national team point of view and from the point of view of Celtic as we were once the club which turned them out on a conveyer belt for club and country both.

How many decades – for decades it is – since we produced a top-class finisher from the academy? That’s one that should be keeping our new head of Under 18 football up at night when we finally reveal who that is. That’s something that’s long overdue to be addressed.

The end of this tournament at least means the end of chatter about Billy Gilmour and I for one will am mightily relieved about that. Neil McCann was basically unbearable trying to shoehorn praise from him into every sentence.

The stats on Gilmour are appalling. Every player in that Scotland side save for the keeper has more career goals than Gilmour does.

I couldn’t even tell you what his natural position is, but he is by no stretch of the imagination a player you would play if what you wanted were goals, and since he doesn’t play the anchoring role, he strikes me as the ultimate example of a luxury player, someone who can do fancy stuff on the ball (when?) or make the killer pass (when?) … but what we needed were warriors with the drive to actually win the match.

And we might as well have left James Forrest at home. The guy who was arguably the most exciting player in the SPFL for the last ten weeks of the season got precisely zero minutes in the team, even when we were chasing the points that would have kept us in the tournament.

Instead, we saw the incomprehensible introduction of Lewis Morgan who only got into the squad late because of an injury to Lyndon Dykes.

Apparently, he plays as a striker in the MLS … well wow. James Forrest played a role in firing Celtic to a double, but Clarke has always preferred players from outside Scotland to those in our own fair land, and that blind-spot has been noted for a while now.

The tactics all the way through the competition was atrocious.

We were found out early, against Germany, and the full futility of the system was utterly exposed.

We’re very lucky to have gotten such middling sides as the Swiss and the Hungarians in the group, two teams a more adventurous Scotland had a better than average chance of getting something against … this one barely troubled them.

You could see that the system was not working. The minute teams pressed us up the pitch we fell to pieces. At one point, just after the 30 minute mark, the stats flashed up on the screen that we’d had 70% possession and three times as many passes.

Virtually all of those passes were ineffectual.

The stats geeks would have been overjoyed with those numbers. Those of us who watch football and understand what we’re watching were more interested in what happened the moment Hungary decided not to be so passive and started hunting the ball.

Our possession and passing stats dropped precipitously and those for misplaced passes and turnovers started to rise.

The lack of width in the team was shockingly apparent, and that’s why those shots on target stats are so disgraceful.

Christie, Morgan, Forrest and Armstrong can all play out on the flank. Instead, we went with a system involving attacking full-backs … a different proposition entirely, by the way, to wing backs which we didn’t bother to use.

As a consequence, we had the worst of all worlds.

Pushing Robertson and Ralston too far up the pitch rendered us easy pickets for counter attacks, and Germany punished that with severity.

Keeping them too far back meant McGinn having to go wide right at times and our centre forward being dragged left at others … madness. Our midfield goal threat eliminated chasing the ball on one flank and the striker taken out on the other.

And this wasn’t even a problem which only became apparent in Germany. The craziness of four central midfielders in the team was blatantly obvious for many months and many Scotland games before this competition kicked off.

That the manager stuck with basically the same team-shape for the first two matches was bad enough.

That he continued with it into the third is unforgivable.

Keeping that same shape virtually all the way through a major competition, until it was entirely dumped in the closing moments of the crucial game … that ought to be a sackable offence.

The collapse of any semblance of tactical discipline is as revealing as anything else; what it reveals is the complete absence of a Plan B, and I accept that there were issues with injuries, and particularly to Tierney which robbed us of anyone to cover for Robertson when he went off.

That’s a poor excuse though, because Plan B didn’t have to involve taking Robertson off late in the game; Greg Taylor could have come on for him if he was tired.

And what exactly were we saving his energy for? The flight home?

In the end, the manager was just throwing attackers at the problem and hoping it would work; the wrong attackers at that. That he attempted to actually stick with a variant of the system is clear anyway in his decision to move McLean to left back in the first place, but no-one will tell me that Taylor would not have done a better job of it.

Nothing about his approach made a blind bit of sense.

How many central midfielders were in the squad?

We had McGregor, McTominey, McLean, Jack, McGinn, Armstrong, Christie and the boy wonder. Eight of them.

We had six centre backs; Hanley, Tierney, McKenna, Porteous, Cooper and Hendry. We actually had cover at both right back and left back … but McCrorie and Greg Taylor didn’t get on the pitch for even a minute across three games.

In the context of that, his decision to put McLean to left back late in the game stinks to high heaven and makes absolutely no tactical sense at all. It’s scandalous.

In that squad bloated with centre backs and midfielders, all to accommodate his horrific formation, we brought two wingers, one for the left (Morgan) and one for the right (Forrest). When we finally brought one on it was to play as a second striker, although we had a top prospect in Tommy Conway sitting on the bench waiting for his moment.

Like Forrest, McCrorie and Taylor, he had himself a nice wee end of season break.

So too did Ryan Jack, whose inclusion in the squad in the first place was an insult to every footballer who didn’t make it to Germany.

The whole thing was lopsided and lacking any kind of structure. It was a team picked more out of blind loyalty to a manager’s personal favourites, and entirely wedded to his brutally dull style of play than it was to giving us the best possible chance to progress.

And with such a complete collapse, and the evident failure to learn even late in the day, to adapt into a shape which was at least semi-functional even when victory would have taken us through, with such a dispiriting and insipid, some would say even gutless, end to our participation in this tournament, from the opening day hammering to Germany to that predictable but no less wrenching last minute annihilation of what little hope remained, there is one obvious step for the SFA to take, but the manager should not wait for their call.

Steve Clarke is, I believe, an honourable man, a manager who might even have flirted with greatness at one time, but has ultimately proved too wedded to one system and one that’s not even that much fun to watch.

And as an honourable man he must not cling to excuses or look for salvation, or attempt to mount the argument that he should be the man entrusted to transform us into something new … he’s had his chance, and this is the time to put the country first.