Scotland manager not put off by vagaries of conducting pre-tournament preparations in public
Steve Clarke has stressed his commitment to training in the centre of Glasgow despite photographs emerging of a stricken Lyndon Dykes from moments after he suffered a Euro 2024-ending injury.
The manager has set great store by Scotland being visible in the run-up to such an eagerly awaited tournament, which kicks-off next Friday night when his side face hosts Germany in Munich.
Enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat by a spate of injuries, the latest of which befell Dykes towards the end of a training session on Friday. Pictures of the stricken Dykes, taken by a sleuthing photographer standing on an embankment overlooking Lesser Hampden, quickly circulated on social media after the striker slipped and injured his ankle. Confirmation that Dykes would miss Euro 2024 arrived the following day following scan results.
Clarke has made it a deliberate ploy to train where his players have been able to drink in the building atmosphere among fans, as opposed to Euro 2020, when Scotland were based in the north-east of England prior to games against Czech Republic, England and Croatia. They also travelled to Spain for some pre-tournament training, before playing the Netherlands in the Algarve and Luxembourg in Luxembourg en route back home.
Scotland trained last week in Glasgow and will do so again this week on their return from tonight’s warm-up fixture against Gibraltar back in southern Portugal.
Clarke was circumspect about the Dykes injury becoming public so quickly. “The news was going to come out anyway,” he said last night in a pre-match briefing with reporters. “I don’t think you can keep too much in-house these days. It is what it is. You just deal with it.”
Rather than focus on the negatives, including a half-naked man who was spotted filming the players from the window of a flat overlooking the pitch, he chose to accentuate the positives.
“We can feel the excitement building, even just from the people watching from the hill behind Lesser Hampden,” he said. “There was a guy half naked hanging out his window watching from one of the flats the other day! Not such a pretty sight, but everybody is watching, everybody wants a little bit of it. You can feel that
“Some of the coaching staff walk from the hotel down to Hampden in the morning to get a bit and they can feel the mood of the nation. That has been quite important. The last time was obviously Covid, so there was isolation anyway, but we were stuck down in a fantastic facility in the north of England. It’s nice to be in the country. I think the players are enjoying it as well.
“The last time we went to Spain for the pre-camp and had a lovely camp there in La Finka Resort,” he added. “We decided this time to just keep them in the country and let them feel how excited everybody is and then hopefully it rubs off. They know anyway. They understand how big it is for the country.”
