Faroes bust-up can help melt Icelanders
Scotland assistant manager Tommy Burns wants the players to use the fires stoked up by a half-time bust-up in the Faroe Islands to melt away Iceland’s challenge on Saturday.
The Scots travel to Reykjavik on the back of one of their most embarrassing failures – the 2-2 draw against the part-timers last month.
They had found themselves 2-0 down in just 12 minutes but, following some harsh words in the dressing room from captain Paul Lambert and deputy Barry Ferguson, rallied to salvage a draw.
It was certainly better late than never, especially as manager Berti Vogts and his right-hand man had attempted to fire up the players beforehand.
He said: “We told the players ‘have it in your mind that you are angry players and this an angry team – do you want to be remembered as the team that lost to the Faroes?’
“All of those things were in their minds to make them aggressive and go out and impose themselves on the game.
“In the early part of the game we were okay but they went up the park and scored two goals, which was certainly something we had never allowed for.
“Then it became a totally different thing altogether. All the negative things started running through their minds.
“Half a dozen of them had been playing reserve team football every week, it was their first major game, so at half-time we tried to calm them down and make some points to them.
“When they came in at half-time Barry was raging, Paul was raging. We calmed them down and once the initial anger had gone we said ‘right, use this, use that and here is how we are going to sort it out’.
“It was only at the end of the game that we said to them ‘listen, we told you this last Monday’.
“If they had started the game as angry players then we would probably have won it.”
The message therefore was that the Scots should kick off in Reykjavik in the way they restarted in Toftir.
But Burns admitted that the inexperience of the squad meant it was still vulnerable to swift tactical changes made by the opposition.
This had been borne out in an August friendly when the mainly young Scots were given a Hampden Park run-around by Denmark.
He said: “We told them how Denmark would line up and if they did line up in a different way we would change that.
“The players knew that but the game was going on and they didn’t react. But that’s young players getting caught up in the atmosphere of the game instead of watching closely what is going on on the pitch.
“Hopefully that will not happen in this game and it is important that the more experienced players see the need to make those changes instead of expecting younger players to do it.”
