Scotland concerns over Norway pitch as surface branded 'horrible' and covered in 'sand'

Carver – who courted controversy with comments in March about the Oriam surfaces Scotland elected to forgo in favour of setting up their base camp at Lesser Hampden – has also received information from his own source that would not appear to augur well but is keen to retain perspective over any possible difficulties.

“As it happens, I have a friend who was at the cup final two weeks ago. He sent me a picture of it and he said it wasn’t great,” he said. “But we’ve looked at the video and it looks okay on that. Obviously, it’s from a distance. In the picture he sent me it didn’t look great. But again, they’ve had a week, 10-days to prepare it. That’s almost two weeks by the time we play there. So you hope it will be in decent condition. You’ll get nothing from me on pitches…

“Listen, we just have to get on with it. We can’t make an excuse. When we get there we’ll have a look at it. We won’t train on it before we play because we don’t do that. But we’ll have a look at it and we just have to get on with it. In modern day, most players play on decent pitches every week. But every now and again there’s one that isn’t great and they have to play on it.

“So, we have to just deal with it and we won’t be using that as an excuse. We’re not going to use the pitch as a distraction. We’re totally focused on the game. You have to adapt [to whatever conditions you face]. So, if the pitch is poor then we’ll adapt to it and do the best we can.”