Steve Clarke insisted he did not consider quitting as Scotland manager despite being heavily criticised in the aftermath of his team’s European Championship group-stage exit earlier this summer.
After naming his squad for the upcoming Nations League matches against Poland and Portugal, the 60-year-old faced the media at Hampden on Tuesday for the first time since the tournament-ending defeat by Hungary in Stuttgart in June.
Asked if he had pondered walking away in the wake of the Euros disappointment, Clake said: “No.”
Expanding on why he felt compelled to stay on, Clarke – whose deal runs until after the 2026 World Cup campaign – smiled: “My contract!
“I’ve always said I’d love to go to a World Cup with my country. I’ve got a group of players that are determined to go to a World Cup with their country, and for some of them it will be their last chance, it will certainly be my last chance, so there’s your motivation there.”
Clarke is “optimistic” that Scotland can recover from their Euros disappointment in a similarly strong manner to the way they bounced back from their World Cup play-off defeat by Ukraine in 2022.
“We didn’t achieve what we wanted to achieve in the tournament,” Clarke said. “I think the biggest thing is you have to learn in football to move on.
“The last time we had a disappointment on this level would be when we failed to get to the World Cup. We went away, we reset, we came back and we managed to qualify for the Nations League A section.
“We responded well. The last qualifying campaign for Euro 24 was probably one of our best. That’s what we have to do again.”
It's a return to @HampdenPark first-up in League A of the UEFA Nations League, as we take on Poland.
➡️ A limited number of tickets remain – secure your seat today: https://t.co/lf8X0AQezX
— Scotland National Team (@ScotlandNT) August 27, 2024
Clarke insisted he would take the criticism that came as his way “on the chin” but he felt injuries to the likes of Lyndon Dykes, Lewis Ferguson, Aaron Hickey, Nathan Patterson and Ben Doak and then losing Kieran Tierney mid-tournament proved a clear hindrance to Scotland.
“There’s always going to be criticism when you don’t achieve your targets,” Clarke said. “If all the criticism comes to me, that’s fine, I can take it.
“I think you have to look at the fact the build-up to the tournament wasn’t smooth.
“We lost a lot of players injured, even from in-camp. We lost a lot of players. I think what we’ve shown is that if we’re missing one or two key players, then we’re not as strong a side as we would be with those players in the team.
“There’s lots of little things that go into making a team in a tournament. It wasn’t our tournament. It didn’t fall our way and you end up with a disappointment. There’s too many little things that didn’t come together.”
While acknowledging the frustration of a nation at not making it out of the group stage, Clarke feels the fact Scotland are now arriving at tournaments with a sense of expectation among their supporters is a sign of the progress they have made in recent years.
“You take it two ways, but for me I take it as a compliment because it means that myself, my staff and the players have done a really good job to raise the expectation,” Clarke said.
“When I took the job it was over 20 years since we’ve been at a tournament. We’ve now been at two out of the last three, so we must have done something right.
“So you raise that expectation. If the expectation now is you have to qualify for the tournament and you have to come out of the group stage, then that’s what we’ll try and do in the next tournament in 2026.”
