Scotland assistant national coach Stuart McCall has praised the belief in the squad ahead of the upcoming Euro Qualifiers against Georgia and Germany.

The players gathered for a training session at Scotland team base today and will fly out to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on Wednesday, before the match itself on Friday.



Stuart Armstrong and Christophe Berra have both withdrawn from the squad but Scott Brown and Ikechi Anya are expected to recover from slight knocks after sitting out of today’s session.

Speaking to the Scottish FA, McCall said: "Naturally everyone is buzzing and looking forward to it. We’ve had a couple of call-offs and Scott Brown and Kech (Anya) took knocks but they’ll be okay for the games. You’re always just hoping you get through the weekend games and i think we’ve been fortunate over the last year that we've not had that many call-offs.”

Georgia sit second-bottom of Group D and suffered a 1-0 defeat on their visit to Scotland last October. New manager Kakhaber Tskhadadze has been brought in and will be determined to reverse his country’s fortunes, starting against Scotland.

“They have a new manager so they may have new ideas and a new system,” said McCall. “They got beat 4-0 by Poland in their last game but they were only 1-0 down until the 89th minute when Lewandowski got a hat-trick. They could quite easily have got a point off Poland. Yes they’ve lost a couple of players but they’re still a dangerous opposition and we’ve got to treat them like that.”

Scotland remain in third-place, just one point off Monday’s opponents Germany in second. McCall says that the squad’s belief - from staff to players to fans - is enough to catapult the national team to their first major tournament in over 16 years:

"The confidence and belief comes from performances then results. We started poorly when we first came in, the defeats against Wales and Serbia, but then came little things like victory in Croatia and good performances in other games like the victory over Ireland and Poland where we put in such a good strong performance.

"I think what we now have is belief, the staff have belief, the players have belief in each other and the fans have got belief. It can soon change round we know that, but I think we have a bit of confidence and everyone is in it together. We’ve just got to produce the results now."