Steve Clarke deploys his Atrocious Torture Instruments. Again.

The moment in Thomas Harris’ masterpiece novel when the Florentine police officer, Rinaldo Pazzi, realises that the man he’s been investigating—Dr Fell—is actually the escaped serial killer Hannibal Lecter comes during a visit to an exhibition called Atrocious Torture Instruments.

I was thinking about atrocious torture instruments last night whilst watching that horrendous excuse for a football match unfold at Hampden. And I don’t know if it’s going to take an even bigger calamity than that, but I do wonder if the SFA will ever come to a similar realisation to the one Pazzi has in that moment—the moment when you suddenly grasp that what’s in front of you is far, far worse than it first appeared.

Pazzi is investigating Fell because he believes he might be involved in the disappearance of the head of the Capponi Library. Realising he’s actually on the trail of a prolific serial killer is something else entirely.

Which brings us neatly to Steve Clarke, the man who is slowly killing the passion of every single person who watches Scottish football.

The amazing thing for me is that Clarke has lasted this long. He shouldn’t have got through the Euros without, at the very least, a serious conversation about his future—and a hard examination of his credentials to be national coach. He would not have survived such an examination. I find it inconceivable that anyone who looked at Scotland’s performance during that tournament with a dispassionate eye would find it even remotely acceptable.

The SFA did, obviously. They must have, because they retained him. They must have thought the form that followed it was acceptable, too, because he’s still in the job.

I was thinking about atrocious torture instruments because, honestly, I can think of few things worse right now than watching this Scotland team play that brand of football. For any football fan, watching that is the sporting equivalent of having your fingernails pulled out. It is dreadful. Unwatchable. Unsatisfying.

Long-ball pish. An inability to defend. An incoherent shape. And then there’s this: last night, one of the finest attacking midfielders in Europe—Scott McTominay, the hero of many a recent Scotland match—was being played wide right. Wide right. Nullifying everything that makes him an elite-level footballer. Playing McTominay out there was farcical. It was disgraceful.

So for a moment, ponder what could possibly be worse than watching Scotland right now. Let’s genuinely think about the kind of horrific things human beings have done to each other across history—and ask whether any of them would give you a worse experience than this current Scotland team.

And I’ll tell you what: there aren’t many.

Cement shoes? Pretty grim. But at least it’s over fairly quickly. Still, imagine how it must feel to have those things strapped to your feet, knowing what comes next. Watching that Scotland team last night, I think a few of them had cement boots on.

A total lack of movement, pace, energy—a yawning absence of interest. The team looked utterly spent. As far as I’m concerned, you could strap the concrete to me and chuck me in the Clyde, as long as I didn’t have to watch another minute of Steve Clarke’s team. Drowning’s at least quick. It’d be over faster than 90 minutes.

In medieval France and Germany, they practised a method called “wheeling.” They’d tie you to a giant wooden wheel—sometimes weaving your limbs through the spokes first—then spin it while smashing your body with iron bars. The pain would be unimaginable. And then they’d leave you there—broken, bleeding, ruined—until you finally expired.

Slow. Brutal. Grotesque. You’d think that was the outer edge of human depravity. But oh no—we’re only just warming up. Even that might be preferable to holding Hampden debentures and knowing you’re duty-bound to witness this Scotland side on repeat.

I think it’s the least Steve Clarke deserves for throwing in that young keeper last night. At half-time I checked—he hasn’t played first-team football since August 2023. His minutes last night were more than he’s had in nearly 18 months. If you’re blaming him for that performance, you’re looking in the wrong place.

That’s on the manager. Throwing someone that rusty into a game was reckless bordering on cruel. If part of a manager’s job is to protect his players, then this was one of the most grotesque derelictions of duty I’ve ever seen.

Flaying—now that was a horror show. An invention that could only have come from someone utterly devoid of a soul. It involved peeling a victim’s skin off, inch by inch, over hours. Done carefully enough not to kill too quickly, although victims often died of blood loss or shock. The torturer considered that premature death a failure.

My eyeballs felt flayed watching that performance. You could tell early on what kind of night it was going to be. The line-up was baffling. The decision to play McTominay out wide would have been a scandal even if I hadn’t needed him to grab a goal to get my coupon up. And the approach? Humping the ball long instead of playing any sort of coherent football? Laughable. When we did try to pass it, it was either backwards or sideways. I just wanted it to be over.

The Vikings allegedly had something called the blood eagle.

If you’ve heard of it, you know what’s coming. Was it real or was it myth? Doesn’t matter. The fact that the human imagination could invent such a thing is bad enough. It involved slicing through the ribs, opening them up, pulling the lungs out so they looked like wings—while the victim still breathed.

And to make things worse? They rubbed salt into the wounds.

Now you tell me that Steve Clarke managing the national team isn’t the modern-day equivalent of rubbing salt into every Scotland fan’s wounds.

And probably a fair few of the players’. Andy Robertson and others, who’ve played marathon seasons and were surely hoping for some rest, looked last night as if they were dragging their lungs behind them.

Yes, players play too many games. But to make guys who’ve run themselves into the dirt through a full domestic campaign endure that was disgraceful. Clarke didn’t create the schedule—but he sure as hell didn’t help with his choices.

Here’s one that’s almost genteel by comparison: sawing. A favourite of mediaeval Europe and the Ottomans. You’re hung upside down, so blood rushes to your head. Then they saw you in half. Slowly. What made it so monstrous? You stayed conscious. Your brain stayed fully online until near the end. You felt everything.

Watching Scotland is like that. You’re aware of every misplaced pass, every glaring error, every lazy defensive lapse, every forward who can’t control a simple ball. And you wish your brain would just shut off so you didn’t have to endure it anymore.

Yes, you could turn off the telly or leave the ground. But let’s be honest—there’s a masochist in every football fan. And you need that streak to keep watching this.

But even that masochism has limits. And judging by Hampden’s attendance last night, the tipping point may have been reached. You can’t keep feeding the fans this garbage and expect them to keep showing up for it.

Remember Winston Smith in 1984, being taken into Room 101?

The cage on his face? The rats? That wasn’t invented for the novel. Rat torture was real. It was used all over mediaeval Europe—The Tower, the Inquisition. They’d place a bucket on your chest with a rat inside, then heat it. The rat, in its panic, would do the only thing it could: dig its way through you. Gruesome. Painful. Nightmarish. But honestly, watching Scotland is somehow more awful.

For some fans, Hampden is Room 101 now; according to the novel, everyone knows what is in Room 101; the worst thing in the world, and that differs for everyone. But for a growing number of people, watching this dire, joyless nonsense—if we’re calling it football—has become the worst thing in the world.

The attendance wasn’t just down 20,000. It was the silence. I’ve seen Scotland fans dance through hammerings, still singing, still celebrating the act of supporting. But Hampden last night? It was a graveyard.

The Brazen Bull sounds awful. They’d lock you in a metal statue of a bull, light a fire underneath, and slowly roast you alive. The pipes sticking out of it were designed to turn your screams into snorts. Horrific. But you know what? Seems a fitting end for whoever at the SFA keeps shackling us to this endless cycle of torment.

How about impalement? Vlad the Impaler’s specialty. A sharpened stake up the backside and out through the shoulder. Slow, agonising death. Sometimes it took days.

Vlad once did it to a whole village, as a warning.

Steve Clarke doesn’t even get a slap on the wrist.

No threat to his job. No ultimatum. There’s something to be said for those old methods of encouragement, those old motivation techniques, isn’t there?

And now we get to the worst of the worst. My top two. One of them I’ve known for years, the other I only recently discovered—but I’m determined to build a story around it someday because it’s that twisted. First up? Lingchi. The Chinese death of a thousand cuts. The fate I’ve often dreamed of for our Ibrox friends.

It was already being phased out when a notorious execution occurred in 1905. The victim, Fou-Tchou-Li, had murdered his master—one of the gravest crimes in Chinese society. His execution was photographed by visiting Westerners, and those images still exist for the truly iron-stomached.

As the name suggests, the method involved slicing flesh off the victim, piece by piece, starting with the non-lethal bits. You died slowly. Painfully. Publicly.

And that’s the Steve Clarke era in a nutshell. A thousand tiny agonies. And no end in sight. Fans are still being asked to endure it. Still being told to grin and bear it. Still seeing new players thrown into the blender. But with no change in system or approach, it’s just Clarke’s Circle of Death. Chewing them up. Spitting them out. Even the BBC commentary team sounded lost for words.

For the fans, this is Lingchi. And they’ve had enough.

That’s why Hampden was empty. That’s why there was no singing. You know it’s finished when even the Tartan Army can’t muster a song. It’s over. Time to face it. And time for someone to finally show the courage to say it.

Now, if you thought that was bad, brace yourself. Because I give you: Scaphism. Otherwise known as The Boats. It’s the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard of. And it makes everything else here look tame.

The victim is sandwiched between two hollowed-out canoes, with head, hands, and feet sticking out. They’re force-fed milk and honey until the inevitable diarrhoea starts. Then their body is smeared in more honey, to attract insects. Flies, wasps, maggots—everything comes crawling. And the bugs do what bugs do.

They burrow. They devour. They nest. Death is slow. It takes days. You rot alive.

The most famous victim? Mithridates, a Persian soldier who made the fatal error of upstaging his king. He bragged about killing Cyrus the Younger in battle—something the king himself had claimed credit for. For that hubris, he was sentenced to The Boats. He lasted seventeen days.

Think about that. Seventeen days.

Now think about how long Scotland fans have endured this. Clarke’s reign has felt like years of psychological warfare. Slow torture. A grim, unrelenting death march of turgid midfield slogs and soul-sapping tactics.

Seventeen days? We’ve had years.

This is torture. Plain and simple. And it is well past time that someone at the SFA showed leadership, took responsibility, and put us out of our misery.