All roads lead back to a grim night in Prague

IN international football, it is clear the appointment of a non-rookie manager does not guarantee success, as the Berti Vogts years with Scotland serve to illustrate. Vogts, who won Euro ’96 with Germany, knew the landscape well but tripped up in other areas.

It is, however, impossible to review Craig Levein’s first campaign as Scotland manager without reflecting on the drawbacks of relying on a manager who is himself learning the ropes. He brought it up in the early hours of Wednesday morning as the Scotland squad made their weary way back from southern Spain.

Levein stressed the value of experience. “Sometimes you have to go through things to get somewhere,” he said. His own career stands as a monument to this. Levein battled through knee injuries as a player and then started his managerial ascent back at Cowdenbeath. Fear of failure has driven him on but it has also compromised him. Scotland’s Euro 2012 ambitions might have been sacrificed on the altar of the manager’s dread at being left exposed by players he felt he could not yet trust. It led to Prague and the night, whether Levein likes it or not, which many feel defined a seventh consecutive failure to qualify for a major finals.

Even in Spain, Levein found that he is fated to be pursued by this issue of playing without strikers against Czech Republic last year. Sometimes it feels as though he could save a dog from drowning and yet the owner’s first response would still be to ask the Scotland manager to account for that night in Prague. When The Scottish Sun newspaper raised Levein’s hackles by splashing with the news that it was his intention to line up 4-6-0, it felt like it might prove a darkly significant week, and so it proved. Twice on Tuesday night in a hot, sticky room deep in the bowels of Alicante’s Estadio Jose Rico Perez stadium, Levein was asked whether he felt there had been “missed opportunities” in the campaign. The inference could be heard loud and clear above the blaring Spanish horns being sounded outside the ground. Twice he gave the same answer, and neither time was it the one many people wanted to hear: Yes, he regretted a night when Scotland left a great yellow stain on the beautiful game. Instead, he regretted not organising more friendlies in order to get a better handle of the team prior to starting out against Lithuania last September, on what has since proved another damaging night for Scotland’s Euro 2012 ambitions.

Perhaps Levein is right and we are wrong to be so obsessed by this failure to play a striker in Prague. Perhaps, if we really wish to pinpoint a defining night, we must relocate to Stockholm, when a match which was supposed to be Levein’s last opportunity to fine-tune was rendered meaningless by a raft of call-offs.

The subsequent 3-0 defeat against Sweden spooked Levein and helped turn him into the ultra-cautious manager whose first instinct was to avoid defeat in Lithuania at the start of the campaign. He lost his nerve. The reason he picked the Team Without Strikers is that he feared what might happen if players he didn’t know well enough froze in the white heat of an international game, although he didn’t perhaps take enough stock of the fact that the opponents were themselves in considerable disarray.

Levein admitted things had “started slowly” in Kaunas, even though, at the time, the 0-0 draw in the first qualifier was greeted with wild acclaim in some quarters. You imagine that, privately, Levein wasn’t fooled by this enthusiasm. “I was trying to establish who the best players were, and I was still trying to pull everyone together,” he said on Tuesday.

Then, when little Liechtenstein so nearly plundered a draw from a match in which the manager was persuaded to make the switch to two strikers, he took even firmer refuge in the belief that containment is all.

Which brings us to Prague. On Wednesday morning, as Levein admirably sought to engage with questions despite the freshness of defeat to Spain, he admitted that he hadn’t known enough about players he had then strapped into a strait-jacket. He said Scotland “might have lost 3 or 4-0 nil” at that stage of the development process if they had been any bolder. Although Levein was impressively frank when admitting he had learned a great deal during the last 13 months, he was in no mood to offer a mea culpa. The campaign, he insisted, had unravelled on an afternoon in September at Hampden Park against Czech Republic and not last year against the same opponents in Prague.

“I keep saying that the game in Prague was 90 minutes against a team who, at the time, were ranked far higher and we lost 1-0,” said Levein. “In the game at Hampden we were winning 2-1 with minutes to go when the referee gives a penalty, and then we don’t get a penalty. That is far more realistic when talking about costing us than a 90 minute match when we [might] have lost 3 or 4-0 at that stage.”

However, if we accept that Levein has been badly treated by fortune, then George Burley, whose own patchwork team was left to play for an hour with ten men in the critical game with Norway during the last set of qualifiers, must be treated with the same indulgence. So, too, Czech Republic on that afternoon at Hampden last month, when they were denied a strong penalty claim in the first half and during a period of the game when they nearly blew Scotland away.

Levein deserves to be backed by Stewart Regan, whose sincere offer of a handshake as they waited by the baggage carousel was an indication of the support which was later outlined by a statement from the chief executive. Levein, in turn, looked out each of his players and thanked them for their efforts, before turning to begin the 11-month countdown to the next competitive match. He, more than anyone, knows what is expected of him after this frustratingly botched dry run.