Grant Hanley believes Scotland have to “get back to basics” if they’re to have an opportunity of progressing previous the group phases of Euro 2024.
It was a dismal begin for Steve Clarke’s facet as they had been humbled 5-1 by hosts Germany within the opening match on Friday night time, leaving them with only one win of their final 10 video games.
They should take one thing towards Switzerland on Wednesday to stay with an opportunity of reaching the knockout stage of a serious competitors for the primary time.
Forward of the journey to Cologne to face the Swiss, Hanley, who got here on as an alternative in the beginning of the second half towards Germany following Ryan Porteous’ pink card, was eager to consign that night time to historical past and give attention to returning to the kinds of performances which have taken Scotland to back-to-back European Championships.
“It happens in football,” he mentioned.
“You’ve got durations the place performances and outcomes go nicely, significantly if we add a defensive viewpoint the place you aren’t conceding objectives, and the reply for us is to get again to fundamentals and actually think about the place and why we had success earlier than.
“It’s troublesome to place your finger on.
“From the players’ point of view, our main work comes on the training pitch to do what we can to improve.
“Now we have had a few days to place it to mattress. The supervisor had a few conferences final night time to go over it and put that behind us, draw a line below it and sit up for the following recreation.
“We are talking about playing at the top level, we are talking about playing against a top side.
“These video games are enormous, it’s a huge event and everybody needs to play on these kinds of nights.
“Obviously there is maybe added nerves, but I don’t think that is something we can use as an excuse as we didn’t perform like we wanted to.
“Once more, we’ve got drawn a line below that and our most important focus is what we’ve got bought going ahead.”
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Scotland head coach Steve Clarke explains who he’ll now method their subsequent recreation on the Euros towards Switzerland and who he might be supporting when England tackle Serbia.
Clarke prompt he had maybe clouded the gamers’ judgment by giving them an excessive amount of info, however Hanley was not satisfied.
“I don’t think so. From a players’ point of view we have to look at ourselves first and look at how we approached the game, how we performed and the reasons for that,” the previous Blackburn and Newcastle defender added.
“We will look at the reasons why we maybe never turned up as we would have hoped to have done or performed the way we can perform to have a positive performance and a positive result.
“This can be a group that has been collectively for fairly some time now and we’ve got had our ups and downs collectively.
“So I think we have to take confidence from the group, that we have shown before that we have bounced back from negative results. So that will be our focus again.
“Clearly we need to put Friday night time behind us and provides ourselves a greater probability to get a consequence.”
Might Billy Gilmour begin towards Switzerland?
Hanley and the remainder of the Scotland camp watched a formidable Switzerland beat Hungary 3-1 of their first recreation.
He mentioned: “The lads watched the game and Switzerland has some really good quality in the side.
“I’m hoping that we flip up and are ready for the sport and placed on a efficiency like we’ve got been doing for a number of years.
“We have a massive opportunity to be successful again.
“With exhausting work we’ll be certain that we put together and provides our all once more.”
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