Barry Bannan insists the Scots don’t fear Germany despite admitting their opponents deserved to be crowned world champions.
The reason for the Crystal Palace midfielder’s positive attitude ahead of the Euro 2016 opener in Dortmund is that, as well as watching the Germans dazzle in Brazil, he has seen them fail to shine.
Bannan dismissed their 7-1 hammering of the host nation in the semi-final as a “freak result” while their 4-2 loss to Argentina in Dusseldorf on Wednesday night was the talk of the steamie at Scotland’s Mar Hall training base.
Perhaps surprisingly, Bannan gave the live TV showing of that game a miss “I was watching England and fell asleep!” but he will be going over the footage with the rest of the squad in due course.
However, he has still seen enough to convince him that Scotland should not be written off in the Westfalenstadion on Sunday.
“I watched all of the Germany games in the World Cup and I saw one before the finals, against Chile I think, where they looked a bit shaky,” he said.
“Also, the Brazil game was a freak result. It’s easy to look at the Brazil match and think Germany were brilliant but I also think Brazil were bad that night.
“The Germans are the strongest and best team in the world at the moment but we are on a high as well.
“We have faced really good teams such as Spain a couple of years ago and taken them all the way. So we don’t fear them.
“We are just looking forward to going out there and seeing how good they really are.
“There were teams in the World Cup who were relying on one player to score goals for them, whereas Germany had goals from everywhere.
“They strolled through the tournament and were strong in all positions and that is what we are trying to build to ourselves.
“There are no unbelievable players here we are all steady and work hard for each other. Hopefully, we can do that on Sunday and put on a good performance.”