Ask St Johnstone fans to name their top 50 forwards of the last 20 years and I suspect the six sightings of Arvydas Novikovas in a five-month loan spell at McDiarmid Park wouldn’t get him anywhere near the half-century.
He’d probably be ranked in the company of that Tommy Wright bloke who only a few diehards could remember when he was caught up in The Telegraph sting a couple of weeks ago, and a John Connolly signing like Lee Hardy.
I don’t suppose Novikovas will be posing for selfies at any Hearts hall of fame awards dinners either.
But a wholly undistinguished Scottish domestic performer discovered on Saturday night that his foot work was plenty good enough to show up a Scottish national team defence.
And it wasn’t only Novikovas, of course.
Fiodor Cernych was able to spin off Grant Hanley for Lithuania’s goal and catch him flat-footed for what should have been a game-clinching second.
It was the type of statuesque central defensive display that has been painfully familiar to the Tartan Army. The end of the last qualifying campaign was no different to the start of this one. Even in Malta before the late flurry of goals there were scary moments.
If the four friendlies in between the Euros and the World Cup were to serve any purpose, surely it should have been to test the untested where the side was in the biggest need of surgery.
Instead the centre-back pairings were combinations of the same old, same old. Greer and Hanley, Martin and Berra, Martin and Hanley, Greer and Hanley.
Steven Anderson for Scotland as his St Johnstone team-mate Danny Swanson suggested? Or Andrew Considine and Mark Reynolds at different points over the last year or so when they have been in the Aberdeen team and performing consistently?
All three have played European football in recent seasons and haven’t been exposed, and it isn’t a ridiculous leap of faith to think at least one of them could have done a short term job like a Brian Irvine or a Brian Martin back in the day.
Nobody will persuade me that Hanley is a better defender.
It isn’t the Group F table or fixture list that carries an inevitability of non-qualification for Russia. It’s the knowledge that no team ever gets to a championship finals with the weakness that Scotland has at centre-half and the near certainty that Gordon Strachan won’t look outwith the options he has already trialled to remedy it.
After all, it was just a month ago all the talk was about Scotland’s very own “next Gareth Bale”.
Well, step aside yesterday’s man.
There’s now a 13-year-old who has been described as a potential “saviour of the nation” no less.
We might not qualify for World Cups or European Championships anymore but nobody can say we’re not up there with the best of them when it comes to a bit of hype.
The explosion of interest in Karamoko Dembele is over the top of course, but at least it shows we still care.
The game really will be up when there’s a lad playing with young men seven years older than him and Scottish football doesn’t get over-excited.
Blind hope of a better tomorrow is just about all we have left.
