USA vs Scotland: Craig Levein’s rich pickings for Brazil bid

‘I’VE just got too many good players’, the Scotland coach tells Andrew Smith

CRAIG LEVEIN allowed himself a bout of wishful thinking the other day. The Scotland manager ruminated on sometime soon starting with his two young wingers, Matt Phillips – a player he “can’t wait to see” win his first cap against the United States on Saturday – and James Forrest. In a tight away fixture, the pair could provide “devastating, counter-attacking pace” that the national team has long been bereft of. Then Levein checked himself. “But then where am I going to put Steven Naismith, and where am I going to put... ach, I’ve just got too many good players.”

If only, cries a nation that can have no great conviction that Levein’s players will be good enough to succeed in the forthcoming qualifying campaign for Brazil 2014 and avoid Scotland’s spell in the major tournament wilderness stretching to, at least, 18 years – the longest such exile since they joined international competition in the 1950s.

Yet that reality does not make a mockery of Levein’s pride in his personnel. Not at the rate potentially credible choices for his squad are appearing. A rate that allows him to consider some bold arithmetic. “I’m going down the road of picking a bigger pool and selecting a group of 22 or 24 from a pool of 44. I’d like to get to a stage of having four players for every position. I would be absolutely ecstatic if I could have that,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll manage that, but that’s the aim. From there, that would give us a degree of continuity. It means that larger group would see themselves as being part of the international set-up.”

It says much about the enlargement of the international franchise under Levein that, even though the squad he is taking across the Atlantic tomorrow is missing six important English Premier League performers in Darren Fletcher, Charlie Adam, James Morrison, Alan Hutton, Jamie Mackie and Graeme Dorrans, and Scotland’s two most valued assets Steven Naismith and James Forrest, the team Levein sends out for the friendly in Florida will be two-thirds full of players entitled to feel they have a claim on first-pick status.

“If you ask me now what my best starting XI is it would be very difficult for me to choose. Because I’ve had to chop and change so many times due to injuries and stuff, it’s been very difficult to get into my head that I’m going to get my best XI available. So, it is all about having a pool and using some under-21 players and also working hard to get boys like Matt Phillips in the squad. We want the guys to keep improving the level they are playing at, then it will enhance the level of the squad.”

Levein considers that, in some areas, the national team can exist on many levels. “I ask myself ‘who is my first-choice right-back?’. Well, I’ve got Alan Hutton, Phil Bardsley. I’ve got Russell Martin, he played Premiership football all season. All of a sudden we have real strength in that area. Then you look at our midfield and we are swamped with really good players. If I can get to the stage where the difference in the players is negligible, one guy thinks a particular player is the best in any given position, or a member of the coaching staff disagrees and thinks it’s another guy, then you have a position where there is real quality and competition for places. That is really hard to get.”

What has also been hard for Levein to get is a Plan B, allowing him to switch from his 4-5-1 orthodoxy when the occasion demands. He has no more than flirted with having two strikers on the field at one time. Wigan’s late-season revitalisation may have given him food for thought, as well as earned Shaun Maloney a recall. The club’s form was spectacularly transformed by manager Roberto Martinez’s decision to switch from a flat back four to installing acting Scotland captain Gary Caldwell as the centre-point of a three. He excelled, as did Maloney and James McArthur, in a fluid 3-4-3 configuration. Dare it be said, not so far removed from Craig Brown’s favoured formation.

“Gary didn’t start the season particularly well. It might be doing him a disservice to say it is just about the system because he played a lot of good games in a four as well, but there’s no doubt he looks more comfortable. We have done a lot of work on the other system and it has taken a long time to have everyone comfortable with it so you have to be careful.

“Discussions are going on [in terms of versatile full-backs who could play centre-back]. I have Bardsley, Hutton, Martin, [Charlie] Mulgrew and [Lee] Wallace. I could do anything with that group.”

Levein has to do only one thing with his group, however numerous, and that is find a way for them to more than match Croatia, Serbia, Belgium, Macedonia and Wales over the next 18 months.