Graeme Souness names his Scotland missing jigsaw piece with Euro 2024 chances rated

He played with Kenny Dalglish and went on to manage Ally McCoist and Mo Johnston.

So it seems reasonable to conclude that Graeme Souness has more than a decent idea of what a proper Scotland striker looks like. And the former Rangers boss suspects, unless Steve Clarke can find one of his own between now and the summer, then the national side might come up agonisingly short in the quest to make history at Euro 2024.

Clarke will begin the countdown to the big one on Friday night in Amsterdam when his side squares up to the Dutch in the first of four warm-up matches before taking his squad to its Bavarian base in June. And Souness is hoping that, over the course of this fine tuning process, the manager unearths a front man who is reaching a rich goalscoring vein of form at just the right moment in time.

Che Adams and Lyndon Dykes have been holding the fort manfully over the last couple of years and are already nailed on to make the flight to Germany so long as they avoid injury between now and June. But Lawrence Shankland is making a late run for the No.9 shirt with a blistering campaign for Hearts. With 27 goals already notched for the Tynecastle club this season, Shankland has fired his way into the argument for a starting place when Clarke names his team for these next two friendlies against Netherlands and Northern Ireland.

And, while Souness wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to tell Clarke how to go about the business of bossing Scotland, he does believe a reliable and prolific striker remains the missing piece in the manager’s jigsaw. Souness - who scored four goals for his country in an international career spanning 12 years and three World Cup Finals - said: “We have a really good chance in the Euros.

“We are a very