Steve Clarke rinses Georgia 'shenanigans' as he pinpoints time wasting karma during Scotland late show

Steve Clarke piled praise on his players for not falling for Georgia’s dirty tricks - and insisted his side got the last laugh when Lawrence Shankland bagged a leveller in time added on.

Clarke and his squad were left bristling here in Tbilisi by what the manager described afterwards as time-wasting ‘shenanigans’ while Scott McTominay branded the hosts as ‘cry babies’ moments after helping salvage a 2-2 draw. Shankland’s late leveller stopped a three game losing streak from growing further and secured another Group A point ahead of Sunday’s curtain downer against Norway at Hampden.

And the manager could hardly hide his delight at the manner in which the draw was snatched - in the injury time which Georgia’s antics had piled up as they looked to hold on for a win. He said: “That’s one of the challenges when you come here - you know they are going to do whatever they have to do to try to get a positive result from the game and you have to react to that.

“You have to show you can control yourselves and don’t get involved. You can’t react to any of the shenanigans. And we just kept going, plugging all the way to the end, knowing that there was going to be extra time added on for time wasting. And it was nice to get the goal in injury time!

“We didn’t come here to lose the game. If you can’t win, don’t lose. We did that. I thought we showed good character.”

Clarke’s side got off to shaky start when Napoli superstar Khvicha Kvaratskhelia fired the home side into an early lead. McTominay levelled shortly after half time with his seventh goal of the campaign before Kvaratskhelia curled home a spectacular second goal to set up a nail biting final half hour.

But the officials added on seven minutes of injury time - and sub