7 Scotland alarm bells ringing loud and clear as Ukraine thrashing reveals key lessons not learned

It's never straightforward being Scottish, is it?

Just as we started to believe our long World Cup drought might be coming to an end, Steve Clarke's team show up with one of their meekest performances in years and it all comes crashing down.

It's a story we've all heard a million times before and it doesn't get any easier to stomach.

Ukraine were well worth their 3-1 victory and it could - should - have been much worse.

After a night like that it's hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong because there were so many contributing factors to a dreary, crushing defeat in front of a raucous Hampden crowd that has come to expect better in the journey under Clarke.

Knee-jerk reactions are no use while we're still raw after a painful defeat and the prospect of three more international games in the next fortnight seem more like a burden than something to look forward to.

But now we've had a good night's kip, Record Sport have taken a look at seven things that went wrong on Wednesday evening.

From the opening minutes Clarke cut an unusually restless figure on the touchline.

Much like the rest of us, he sensed something wasn't going to plan as Ukraine continually cut through our midfield - if it could be called that - like a hot knife through butter.

The entire first half was lambs to the slaughter stuff as Callum McGregor and Billy Gilmour were left exposed and overpowered by the likes of Oleksandr Zinchenko and the sublime Ruslan Malinovskyi.

That was largely because of the tweaked tactical system that saw Lyndon Dykes and Che Adams deployed as a straight front two rather than the balanced 3-4-3 that has worked for us so well in recent months.

Neither forward was asked to do much defensive work and that left John McGinn