Steve Clarke should not have lasted this long. The SFA should spare us any more of this.

Watching Scotland right now feels a bit like being a Sevconut. Everyone is desperately trying to find something positive to cling to, some scrap of hope. But to be perfectly honest, there isn’t a lot out there. There’s not much to be hopeful or optimistic about. Watching Scotland is like listening to a badly played song on repeat—it never seems to stop.

For the second game in a row, Scotland has conceded late in the match. This suggests there might be a mentality issue or a tactical problem. We shouldn’t be losing so many late goals. It’s easy to blame this on tactics, especially when you look at how Steve Clarke handled the final minutes of the game last night. I have to admit my heart sank when I saw him bringing on Lewis Morgan. I turned to my old man and said, “He’s obviously not planning on defending,” even though we were already being torn apart every time Portugal attacked.

There was a certain grim inevitability about losing that goal, and that’s where the comparison to being a Sevconut comes in. They, too, have grown accustomed to glorious failure, almost celebrating it as a sort of victory. Scotland would have celebrated a 2-2 draw at the weekend as if it were a win. Sure, coming back from two down to get a draw is a decent result, but we were playing at home. There are real questions about whether we should ever have been 2-0 down in the first place. Scotland showed very little imagination or attacking intent throughout the game.

Losing late was gutting, even if it was an error that led to the penalty.

There is no composure in this team. Clarke could have closed things down better with his substitutions. Equally, we barely went forward in this match, despite taking an early lead. It was as if we decided that one goal was enough and that we could sit on it. But we were never getting away with that against a side as good as Portugal.

This Scotland side has no real identity. The fans are sick of being the nearly men of international football. The Euros were an utter disgrace, and that last game, in particular, should have seen Steve Clarke falling on his sword.

At any decent football association, he would already be gone. These first two matches in the Nations League should have been the start of a new era for Scotland, an era with confidence where we could achieve something worthwhile.

Because there are areas where this Scotland side is a very good team. But the impression grows that with Clarke at the helm, we are on a road to nowhere. He’s run out of ideas. This four-man diamond midfield system is horrible to watch and ineffective. It’s overly defensive and, frankly, boring.

It’s also lopsided and gives us no width. When you play such a narrow formation, your full-backs have to push up the pitch when attacking.

Yes, it can sometimes pay off, as it did at the weekend with Ralston getting forward to deliver the cross for McTominay’s goal. But more often than not, it leaves you exposed. Without the full-backs going forward, there’s no natural width, which makes it difficult to break down even mediocre defences. When those players are too far up the pitch, we are always going to be vulnerable against sides with pace who exploit the flanks.

Last night, Clarke chose a system with full-backs who stayed back to protect the central defence. That’s fine, but you won’t win many games that way.

If you’re going to use your full-backs in such a withdrawn role, you’re almost forced to sit back for the majority of the game. Your out ball becomes predictable, always up the middle of the pitch, and you lack the players to execute that effectively.

You’ve got a big, bulky centre-forward who can rough up a defence but lacks the close control to beat a man. So, your best tactic becomes lofting the ball into the box, but without wide players, you lose that option. Clarke’s tactics last night were incomprehensible, almost nonsensical, even though we got the early goal.

This was a team sent out to contain the damage, not inflict it.

You might argue we didn’t have much chance of damaging Portugal, but we certainly weren’t going to do it with such a dispiriting football system.

Everything that made Clarke an effective manager at club level is what makes him such a poor one at the international level. At a club, you can build a team to play backs-to-the-wall, rear-guard, hit-them-on-the-break football. If you need a pacey striker or a wide man, you can just sign one. At international level, you have to work with what you’ve got, and I don’t think Clarke is doing that well.

There are wide options available to Scotland. So, if anyone can figure out why James Forrest, one of our best wide players, continually sits on the bench while Clarke brings on the likes of Lewis Morgan, then that person deserves a prize. If there is any logic to that, someone needs to explain it because I don’t see it, and no one else does either.

Scotland fans are incredibly loyal and patient. It takes a lot for them to turn on a manager. But I don’t think they should endure much more of this. They don’t deserve it. Something has to give, and it should have happened already—at the final whistle of the final game of the Euros. The SFA could have done the whole country a favour by taking Clarke aside, shaking his hand, and saying, “Steve, thanks for your service, but your time is up.”

Instead, they are delaying the inevitable, much like over at Ibrox.

And that’s another reason why Scotland fans might feel a little bit like Sevco supporters. You know what’s coming. You know it will happen. You know that for progress, it has to happen. And you don’t want to watch the disaster that will bring it about.

But it’s coming. It’s unavoidable because Clarke is out of ideas, and so there’s a part of you that just wishes it would come—the performance that makes his position completely untenable, even in the eyes of these utterly inept administrators. A result that spares us all the horror show and saves the manager from further humiliation.

But thanks to the SFA, we are doomed to endure this farce until it becomes so obvious that even they have to acknowledge it, so embarrassing that even they can’t deny it, so humiliating that the whole country wants to hide under the bed.