Steve Clarke serves up same Scotland dross as last Euros opener after monumental miscalculation - Keith Jackson in Munich

We could be kind to Steve Clarke and his players and put it all down to stage fright.

Or simply attempt to sum up the whole nightmarish experience as a soul-crushing, pride-swallowing, disappointment. But nobody would buy it. Or at least not anyone who had the stomach to watch this catastrophic opening-night butchering to its ultimate and inevitable conclusion.

The truth is, this beating was more savage than even the scoreline suggests. It was an embarrassment bordering on a national humiliation. And worst of all, as good as the Germans were – and they were infuriatingly rampant – it was also largely self-inflicted. On the very night that the world tuned in to see what Clarke and his vastly improved team are really all about, the manager and his players took it in turn to malfunction and lose sight of the very attributes which had brought them onto this stage in the first place.

It was a truly hideous watch. An agonisingly one-sided ordeal of a football match as Florian Wirtz started the rout, Jamal Musiala added to it and Kai Havertz made it three before half-time. Substitute Niclas Fullkrug put the hosts 4-0 up in the second half and was denied a fifth by an offside ruling before Antonio Rudiger took pity on us and stuck one into the roof of his own net.

This was Scotland’s only effort on target all night. But this pummelling was completed in added time when another German sub, this time Emre Can, fired home from distance. And, over the course of 90 traumatic minutes, it robbed the country of the last fumes of the feel good factor which Clarke had stuck in Scotland’s tank by taking us all here.

Indeed, the longer it went on, the more it all felt like a seriously bad idea going to all this bother, amid such misplaced