UK Edition
Scotland suffer ultimate humiliation of Euro qualifying defeat against 117th-ranked Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan 3 Scotland 0
Twickenham without the comeback – that was the fate of Scotland’s footballers as their Euro 2020 qualifying campaign got off to a calamitous start in Nursultan, the newly renamed capital of Kazakhstan.
Like their rugby counterparts last weekend, the Scots endured an abject first half but, unlike Gregor Townsend’s men, who stunned England, Alex McLeish’s players were unable to summon any positives from the game.
Kazakhstan came into this contest ranked 117th in the world, a team able to boast only a single victory in their 16 most recent competitive games. In fairness, McLeish had to assemble a patchwork team, with six changes from the Nations League victories over Albania and Israel, but he had the confidence to field a 4-3-3 formation designed to take the game to Kazakhstan.
Instead it was the Scots who were shredded, by opponents who, in their first competitive game under Michal Bilek, operated a lethally effective counter-attacking strategy.
It took only four minutes for the tide of yellow jerseys to breach Scotland’s defence. McLeish had given a debut cap to Liam Palmer of Sheffield Wednesday at right-back and deployed Graeme Shinnie on the other flank to fill the gap left by the unavailable pair of Andrew Robertson and Kieran Tierney.
The manager had Scott McKenna in central defence, calculating that he and Shinnie would bring their familiarity as Aberdeen clubmates to the occasion. There were few signs of such understanding when Alexander Merkel played a chip over the Scottish back line for Yuri Pertsukh to kill the ball and shoot home off the crossbar.
Four minutes later, the Kazakh captain, Islambek Kuat, split the Aberdeen pair with a precise pass which was met by Yan Vorogovskiy on the slide with a single touch to steer it beyond Scott Bain.
Throughout this punishment, Scotland were inexplicably supine. Any notion that a transformed team would emerge for the second half was dispelled within five minutes when Baktiyar Zaynutdinov rose above McKenna to head a cross from Gafurzhan Suyumbayev on the bounce past Bain.
Stuart Armstrong gave the 650 travelling fans some hope when he burrowed into Dmytro Nepohodov’s area and shot on target, only for the goalkeeper to dive to touch the effort narrowly wide.
That aside, this was a gruesome Scottish performance and McLeish admitted as much when he said: “It was disappointing not to see a great reaction [at going 2-0 down]. At half time we tried to change the system a little to unsettle Kazakhstan but they were first to the second balls and, after a good start, we just didn’t get up to speed.
“We spoke about not leaving spaces in the defence. We worked on it but it never worked on the night. I brought the rugby team into it and their reaction last week as an example. I said, ‘You’ve got to roll your sleeves up and, if you get a goal, I believe you can get another one’. Unfortunately, the Kazakhs were a team on fire tonight.”
The humiliated Scots now face a long flight to Rimini for Sunday’s meeting with San Marino, where their performance must be seen as transformational. The beleaguered manager cannot afford a single misstep against San Marino, a team considered to be the Group I table makeweights – or they were, until Scotland contested that status.
Match details
Kazakhstan (5-3-2) Nepohodov; Vorogovskiy, Maliy, Postnikov, Yerlanov (Akhmetov 81), Suyumbayev; Pertsukh, Kuat, Merkel, Zaynutdinov (Muzikov 84), Murtazayev (Turysbek 68). Subs Pokatilov (g), Omirtayev, Zhukov, Seidakhmet, Shomko, Fedin, Beysebekov, Shatskiy. Booked Merkel, Suyumbayev.
Scotland (4-3-3) Bain; Palmer, Bates, McKenna, Shinnie; McGinn (McTominay 69), McGregor, Armstrong; Forrest (McNulty 81), McBurnie (Russell 61), Burke. Subs McLaughlin (g), O’Donnell, Souttar, Findlay, Fleck, McLean, Morgan, Kelly. Booked Shinnie.
Referee Srdjan Jovanovic (Serbia).