SCOTT Brown was holed up in his house nursing an injured hamstring when Scotland gave Germany a fright in Dortmund last September. Thankfully, the only things affecting him as today’s return match comes into view are lack of sleep and a bruised ego. Brown made light of the national side’s four-hour stay in the wee small hours at Tbilisi International Airport on Friday evening and said he would love to take out the psychological scars from the nation’s Georgian misadventure upon Joachim Loew’s side tonight.
Footballers these days are a pampered bunch but Gordon Strachan was correct to point out yesterday that there should be no question marks about the application of this squad, who go unrewarded financially for their commitment to the international game. The circumstances of the retreat from Tbilisi were hardly ideal but Brown for one was in no mood to use it as an excuse.
“It doesn’t actually bother you – you are either sitting in an airport or sitting on a plane,” said Brown. “These things happen, you get delays. We came back, we slept well, we’ve eaten well, and we’ve trained well. So for us it’s not an excuse.
“We’ve got our frustration out in the last couple of days in training and we’ve been watching bits and bobs of video,” said Brown. “We’ve got to try and get our minds set on the fact that we are playing the world champions here at Hampden, and that anything can happen. We’ve done it here before and we know we can do it again.”
As terrifying a juggernaut as Germany appear to be, there was no defeatism about the Scotland camp yesterday and such cautious optimism is in fact backed up by the form guide, with the Scots having gone down only by a late, odd goal to both Italy (2007) and Spain (2011), their two most recent meetings with the world champions when they have turned up at Hampden.
In Brown’s view, though, the blueprint par excellence for the job Gordon Strachan’s side face at Hampden tonight came in the Parc des Princes back in 2007 on his sixth cap for his country. France weren’t world champions when James McFadden’s strike from distance beat goalkeeper Mickael Landreau and made directly it into Scottish football folklore but they might as well have been.
Beaten in the final by our fellow Euro 2008 group members Italy, France had lost Zinedine Zidane but they still featured the talents of Lilian Thuram, Franck Ribery, Patrick Vieira, David Trezeuet, Claude Makelele, Nicolas Anelka and Florent Malouda. As they chased the game late on, they brought on a couple of promising youngsters called Karim Benzema and Samir Nasri. Not only did Alex McLeish’s Scotland, with Brown excelling on the right side of midfield, hound the life out of them, McFadden came up with something out of the ordinary to win the game on the night.
“The key that night was teamwork,” said Brown. “We knew we weren’t going to get a lot of the ball, we understood that. We defended 4-5-1 and everyone stayed in their shape, and we doubled-up when we could. We closed people down, and when we did get the ball, we were brave with it.
“And everyone knows what Faddy did – he put one in the top corner from 35 yards,” Brown added. “Sometimes you need that little bit of luck or brilliance from an individual, and hopefully against Germany we get that. We have players there who can do that. We’ve got Ikechi Anya and Jamesy Forrest. They’ve got a bit of pace and bring a lot to us and we’ve got Steven Fletcher up front.”
With the matches coming thick and fast, quite simply there is no time for hand-wringing over the failure in the Boris Paichadze Stadium. Six points from Scotland’s remaining three matches would give us a decent chance of a play-off spot, while seven or nine would leave us in excellent shape.
Brown has earned the loyalty of his manager, but he knows a few brickbats are headed his way. The 30-year-old has been a model of consistency for Scotland but the midfield area, where he and James Morrison found themselves outmanoeuvred by Georgia’s midfield three, was a cause for concern on Friday night. The likes of James McArthur and Darren Fletcher also have a case for inclusion.
“It [his individual performance] was okay,” said Brown. “Everyone individually in the team wasn’t great, or we would have created more chances. I think we all know we can do a lot better. But it’s not that we owe anyone a better performance. We turned up and played as well as we could on that day. What we did didn’t come off. But everyone there works their socks off, no matter what, so it’s not about owing people anything. It’s about pride in the jersey and trying to get to the Euros because it’s been a long time. We want to be the ones who put that right.”
In case there was any doubting the matter, Brown has no intention of hanging up his boots. “Too right I want to keep playing for Scotland - I’m only 30!” he said. “The manager puts belief in me and I want to repay him by turning up for every single squad and not letting him down. I enjoy playing and will keep training for as long as I possibly can. Unless I don’t get picked, of course.”
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