James Forrest suffered painful Celtic flashback in Gibraltar as Lincoln Red Imps never far from his mind

There was a moment the other night when James Forrest suffered a painful flashback to a previous encounter with a team from Gibraltar.

With almost an hour on the clock in the Algarve, the name Lincoln Red Imps shot to mind, and that night the minnows shocked Brendan Rodgers in his first game in charge of Celtic in July 2016. Forrest was involved in that match but – like back then – everything turned out well in the end as the Hoops went on to claim an Invincible Treble. And with Scotland having dodged an egg on the face moment against Gibraltar, the attacker is convinced things are going to work out just fine for the national team.

Monday’s 2-0 victory got Steve Clarke’s side back to winning ways but it wasn’t quite the morale-boosting, thumping win everyone predicted. Instead Scotland wasted a glut of chances and were made to sweat for longer than anyone felt comfortable. But at least it wasn’t another Red Imps.

Forrest said: “Yeah, that’s what happens sometimes. They hadn’t scored in 10 games and I don’t know the last time that they won. Everybody thinks you are going to win by five or six but at club level or international level it’s not as easy as that.

“They’re still working hard, they are trying to make it difficult for us, and they managed to do that for long spells. We had so many shots on goal. The thing is, if we weren’t creating chances then we might have thought about that more but we knew we had subs to come on and freshen it up, and we knew we were creating chances as well.

“We just thought we were always going to get that goal at some point. It would have been better to have got it earlier and we could maybe have kicked on but we got there in the end. The positives are that a few boys haven’t played for a