GORDON Strachan will tell his Scotland team to ignore the hype around an England game and play with calm heads and discipline at Wembley tonight.
The national manager wants no rash tackles, flashes of temper or arguing with the referee as Scotland face England for the first time in nearly 14 years. Strachan played England four times in his own 50-cap international career and claimed that some of his unnamed former team-mates used to let themselves and the team down by losing their cool against the Auld Enemy.
"You don't want to get carried away with this 'passion' thing," he said. "Fighting and scrapping, 'we're the Scots and you took land off us so many hundreds of years ago'. Forget that. If you are really passionate then jump higher, run quicker, run further. Don't go fighting and screaming at referees and crashing into people. The good thing about the Croatia game [Scotland's World Cup qualifying win in Zagreb ten weeks ago] was that we were all disciplined and nobody was arguing with the referee or making daft tackles. Instead, the players were using all their energy for doing what the team needed them to do. That is what has to happen tomorrow."
Unusually, Strachan did not take the players to Wembley for a training session 24 hours before the game, having concluded that they had already trained adequately at Watford's facilities and did not need the hassle of a rush-hour commute into London last night from the team's hotel in St Albans.
Having decided that Scott Brown would be captain again, after missing the win in Croatia in which James Morrison led the team, Strachan said his own pre-match nerves would disappear when Scotland board the bus for one-hour journey to Wembley. "I think it's excitement more than anything else," he said. "The nervousness as a manager comes during the build-up to the game. No matter who I've worked with, I always get to the day of the game and think, 'We can win this, bring it on now'."
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