“A team died out there tonight.”
It is one of Scottish football’s legendary quotes, uttered by Andy Roxburgh on an ignominious night for the national team during the 1994 World Cup qualifiers.
Roxburgh’s side were thrashed 5-0 by Portugal in Lisbon in April 1993 – the same city where Steve Clarke prepares to take his out-of-form and injury-ravaged team on Nations League duty on Sunday. It’ll be Scotland’s first trip to the Portuguese capital since that fateful date.
Roxburgh’s tactics and team selection were criticised in the wake of the match.
Brian McClair had been in outstanding form for Manchester Utd at the time but was an unused substitute. Jim McInally and Stuart McCall got in each other’s way at the heart of midfield, with the former out of the Dundee United team at the time.
There was also the fall-out with Richard Gough, whose international career ended that evening, while his Rangers club-mate, Ally McCoist, broke a leg and the then Scotland boss refusing to leave his post.
He would be gone less than six months later.
It was a sobering night for the Tartan Army, who had been used to reaching World Cups having participated at each of the previous five editions of the tournament. Given Scotland have only reached one World Cup in the subsequent three decades shows how spoiled they were in the good old days.
Roxburgh felt it was a freakish night and scoreline in the old Estadio da Luz. Given the current form of the current side, it may have to be a freakish night for Scotland to be able to produce what would have to go down as one of their greatest ever victories should they be able to turn things around at this particular juncture and in the stadium that replaced the one in which the 1993 team were humbled.
Wins on the road have been pretty hard to come by relatively for Scotland, but doing so against top-tier sides does not come around particularly often.
While Clarke can point to superb victories in Oslo and Vienna during his tenure, you have to go back to June 2013 to find a win over one of the sides in the current top 20.
That was a brilliant win in Zagreb against Croatia early in the Gordon Strachan chapter, with Robert Snodgrass scoring the only goal.
However, that came after the 2014 World Cup horse had bolted, which means you are really looking at the famous win in Paris in 2007 to find a victory that truly counted against one of these giants.
A win in Lisbon would be in the same category as that celebrated triumph in the Parc des Princes, which underlines the size of the task facing Clarke and his beleaguered players.
However, this is League A of the Nations League and, if Scotland want to extend their stay at this level, Thursday’s 3-2 defeat by Poland already has them scrambling around looking for something in this one.
Like the Poles and Robert Lewandowski, Portugal’s main man is still around.
At the age of 39, Cristiano Ronaldo may finally face Scotland for the first time. He scored his 900th career goal in their 2-1 win over Croatia on Thursday and, while he had a disappointing Euro 2024, the forward’s roll of honour is spectacular.
Five Champions League titles, multiple league titles in England, Spain and Italy, 11 major international tournament appearances, five Ballon d’Ors alongside the Euro 2016 and Nations League titles with his country.
Ronaldo is a machine and, if he plays against Scotland, it will be his 214th cap. No man has amassed anywhere near that tally and perhaps never will.
He has played in a few generations of Portuguese talent – from Luis Figo and Rui Costa at the beginning to Bernardo Silva and Bruno Fernandes in the present day.
The midfielders who play on both sides of the Manchester divide are crucial to what Portugal do.
In truth, they should probably have amassed more than the two titles that they have collected in the past eight years across the previous these two decades.
Roberto Martinez, who crossed swords with Clarke during his time in charge of Belgium, once again has an embarrassment of riches from which to select, with his team emerging from a keenly contested battle with Croatia on match-day one.
Current undisputed number one Diogo Costa of Porto became the first goalkeeper at a European Championship to save each penalty he faced when he did so in their last-16 win over Slovenia in Germany.
Silva’s Manchester City team-mate, Ruben Dias, is regarded as one of the best defenders in world football, with Paris Saint Germain left-back Nuno Mendes having fully recovered from an injury-ravaged season to star at the finals while club-mate Vitinha is another who has emerged over the past three or four years.
Chelsea‘s Pedro Neto and AC Milan‘s Rafael Leao supplemented Ronaldo against the Croats and have incredible speed, which will cause its own problems for a Scotland defence that has leaked 31 goals in 13 games of this miserable run.
His side having lost the most winnable game of this group against Poland at home, Clarke now faces up to the most difficult fixture in this campaign and desperate to avoid some of the individual mistakes that have been regularly punished in the past year.
Life in Nations League A can be unforgiving as life in Lisbon has been previously for the Scots.
