Steve Clarke insists Scotland will be ‘ready to go’ despite travel woes

Scotland manager Steve Clarke will look for answers over their disrupted preparations for Sunday’s Nations League clash in Portugal after arriving in Lisbon almost two hours late following a 110-mile road trip.

Scotland trained at Lesser Hampden on Saturday morning before flying from Glasgow to Beja Airport, a former military airbase which hosts no commercial flights in between the Portuguese capital and the Algarve.

Clarke and a player were scheduled to arrive at the SL Benfica Stadium for a 7.30pm media conference on Saturday night, but it began after 9.15pm.

The squad were delayed taking off from Glasgow Airport because of an issue with a baggage carousel and the coach trip also took longer than anticipated.

“I think it was in Spain,” Clarke joked, before being unable to explain why they flew to such a remote airport.

“To be honest, I can’t,” he said. “It’s something we have to look at after this. Listen, we are here now, so let’s crack on with the football questions.

“It’s a quick turnaround, but we’ve got a good group of players. They will turn up tomorrow, don’t worry, and they will be fresh and ready to go.”

While his team-mates arrived at their hotel for a much later dinner than planned, Ryan Christie travelled with Clarke and others in a separate vehicle to perform media duties ahead of the clash.

The former Inverness, Celtic and Aberdeen player brushed off the travel problems.

The Bournemouth man said: “I’ve not found it too bad. Probably as a boy from Inverness having to travel to Glasgow four hours before a game on a Saturday when I was younger, I’ve definitely had worse. I don’t think that will hinder us too much going into the game.”

The initial explanation for the route from the Scottish Football Association was that charter flights into Lisbon normally have early or later slots which did not suit and that other teams use Beja when playing in the capital.

The lengthy journey was another issue to deal with for Clarke on top of the stoppage-time penalty that consigned his side to a 3-2 home defeat by Poland on Thursday in the Group A1 opener.

Scotland have only won once in 13 matches and, although there was much to be pleased about in terms of the attacking display and character, there is little time to remedy the errors that led to Poland’s goals.

Clarke, who has a full squad, said: “You can speak a lot, you can watch videos. The thing is just to get inside the mind of the player and make them aware that when you play against pot one teams, top sides, and certainly we play against one of the best European sides, you have to be focused and any small mistake that you make gets heavily punished.

“You have to move on in football. It was a good performance and a very disappointing result. So hopefully a very good performance here and a better result.

“We have to be defensively sound, but we also have to show that we can be a threat at the other end of the pitch.

“That’s what we have worked on in a very short space of time in between the two games. Hopefully we perform as well as we can.”

Christie is using the quick turnaround as a positive.

“It’s certainly tougher in terms of less time on the training pitch to prepare and analyse, but the positive from it is obviously after what ended up being a frustrating night, it’s nice in football to have another game right around the corner, because it gives you a chance to react to that and try and put things right with a positive performance,” he said.