England's Euro 2020 successes are making Scotland's performance against them look even better – Scotsman comment

Following England’s victory over Denmark, Gareth Southgate and co stand on the brink of triumph at the Euro 2020 championship, 55 years after their last major tournament victory.

Scotland's Billy Gilmour, seen challenging Raheem Sterling, was man of the match in the game against England (Picture: Carl Recine/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

However, as any Scottish football fan will surely know, 54 years ago Scotland became ‘unofficial world champions’ when they famously beat England 3-2 in 1967 at Wembley.

So far in this year’s delayed Euro tournament, Scotland are the only team that England have faced to emerge undefeated after a creditable 0-0 draw. And a draw was the least that Steve Clarke’s side deserved with wing-back Stephen O’Donnell coming close to securing what would have been a shock victory.

In the group stage, England had some nervy moments as they beat Croatia and the Czech Republic by a single goal, before a 2-0 win against Germany and a 4-0 thrashing of Ukraine saw them grow in confidence that will have surely helped during the hard-fought semi-final encounter with the Danes. Even a team en route to the final needs a bit of self-belief before they can start to fire on all cylinders.

Should England beat Italy to become European champions, Scotland’s performance will look all the more impressive.

Clearly, just one goal in three games suggests the national side need to work on creating a better attacking threat and too much can be read into one result, but if they can nearly beat a European finalist, Scotland may very well be a lot better than many people give them credit for and, perhaps, better than they themselves think they are.

So if England do win the tournament, we should say: “Well done – and how about a rematch?!”

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