Why are McBurnie and Stewart not in World Cup mix?

Image source, Getty Images

• Published23 April 2026

On Sunday night Steve Clarke said that he was "more or less set in my mind" about the 26 players he intends to bring to the World Cup, before adding that two spots might still be up for grabs.

He didn't elaborate but you'd hope - probably a forlorn hope - that the Scotland manager has an open mind on his chosen strikers because if he's still weighing things up on that front then the weekend gave him much to ponder.

Ross Stewart, Tommy Conway, George Hirst, Kieron Bowie and Oli McBurnie all scored for their clubs. McBurnie scored twice. Robbie Ure, the former Scotland U-21 player, didn't score, which made a change for him. Ure is not a contender for Clarke's squad but he's scored four goals in six games for IK Sirus who are top of Sweden's Allsvenskan.

Clearly, Clarke has a shortage of goals from his striker(s). It's a problem as old as the hills. Back-to-back games without a goal now, a pair of blanks against Japan and Ivory Coast. Che Adams and Lyndon Dykes - the main men; willing, hard-working, great servants but hardly threatening.

A successful qualifying campaign that featured other-worldly strikes from Scott McTominay, Kenny McLean and one from Kieran Tierney that was just about of this planet, but a campaign, also, during which Clarke's two favourite strikers recorded just seven shots on target across six games.

Adams accounted for six of them with two goals in 446 minutes. Dykes had one attempt on target in half a dozen games - 171 minutes - and he put it away. Credit to him, sort of.

Blame those around them for not providing, or blame the strikers for not being in the right places at the right times, or for wasting the morsels that came their way, but whatever way you dice it, this is one of the burning issues for Scotland.

Can Clarke change his options front? Does he even want to? And, if he does, is he even looking in the right places?

• What would it cost England and Scotland fans to go to World Cup?

  • Published1 day ago

• McKenna keen to reward Clarke loyalty at World Cup

  • Published4 days ago

• Scotland confirm final World Cup warm-up against Bolivia - live on BBC

  • Published9 April

Clarke has taken Scotland to two European Championships and they've scored three goals in six games in those tournaments, one of them an own goal against Germany and another from a McTominay shot against Switzerland that found the net after a huge deflection.

Only one Scottish player has scored directly in any of those group games - Callum McGregor against Croatia in Clarke's first Euros.

The concern is that Clarke doesn't see fit to shake things up, to gamble a little. As a creature of habit, we could almost predict which way he's going to go on all of this.

He'll have five or six strikers/wingers in his squad - Che Adams, Lawrence Shankland, Dykes, Hirst, Conway and Ben Gannon-Doak. He knows them, he trusts them and it would be a surprise if he doesn't pick them.

Comparing levels is not easy. How does a goal in the Scottish Premiership compare to a goal in the English Championship or Italy's Serie A? Bowie, playing for a now relegated Hellas Verona, scored against fourth-placed Juventus on Sunday, for instance. What about the relative strength of the team it's scored for against the team it's scored against?

A Shankland goal against the Old Firm versus an Adams goal against Roma, currently sixth in the table. How do you weigh them up?

Crudely, if you constructed a league table of Clarke's options at centre-forward based on this season's shot conversion rate this is how it would look.

First - Stewart of Southampton. Second - McBurnie of Hull City. Third - Shankland of Heart of Midlothian. Fourth - Hirst of Ipswich Town. Fifth - Conway of Middlesbrough. Sixth - Bowie of Hibernian and now Hellas Verona. Seventh - Adams of Torino. Eighth - Dykes of Birmingham City and now Charlton Athletic.

If it was done on minutes-per-goal then Stewart would still be top with Shankland moving up to second and McBurnie dropping to third, Hirst would be fourth, Bowie fifth and Conway sixth. Adams and Dykes would remain seventh and eighth.

On goals plus assists, McBurnie would be top, Shankland second and Conway third. Adams and Dykes would be still be seventh and eighth.

On Saturday, Stewart scored for Southampton as they made the play-offs for the Premier League. It was his seventh goal in 14 games and his 10th in 31 in a season that has been curtailed by injury. He missed 16 matches. Stewart has been unlucky in that regard for three seasons, but he looks fit and well now.

The former Ross County and Sunderland player scored the winner that put Fulham out of the FA Cup in March and scored again when Southampton claimed Arsenal's scalp in April. The fact that Stewart is barely mentioned as a possible squad player in America is nuts.

This season, he's scored a goal every 122 minutes with a shots–per-goal figure of 3.3. He has a conversion rate of 30.3%. That's remarkably high. When he plays, he's been one of the-most efficient goalscorers in the entire league.

Clarke believes in loyalty to the ones who got the team to the World Cup in the first place. Stewart is not one of those guys, but on form he could be the kind of striker to help keep Scotland in America beyond the group stage.

The head coach needs form players, not protected species. Red carpets should not be rolled out for time served.

McBurnie scored twice for Hull in a 2-1 win over Wrexham on Saturday, his goals ensuring that Hull, like Southampton, are in the play-offs for the Premier League. He's now got 18 goals in 39 games, a run in all competitions that also includes seven assists. For a Scottish striker who missed two months of the campaign through injury, it's an impressive return.

To drill down a little, this season, McBurnie has scored every 172 minutes for his club and has a goal from every 4.2 shots and a conversion rate of 24%.

Recently, he contacted Clarke to see if he had any hope of making the World Cup squad. The way McBurnie tells it, Clarke's answer didn't give him a whole lot of encouragement. The head coach can't afford to be as dismissive as McBurnie made him sound.

Many of those who remember what McBurnie was like when he played for Scotland would, no doubt, agree with Clarke on this, if McBurnie's recounting of their conversation is accurate. Under Alex McLeish and in the early games under Clarke, he had his chance and he didn't take it.

Sixteen caps (seven starts) and no goal. More than that, in nearly 13 hours of action, Scotland only scored once while he was on the pitch. He was also once embroiled in controversy around his commitment to the cause.

It's been five years since he last played for Scotland. That's a fair old penance. Maybe he's a better player and a better person than he was then. He's certainly in a fantastic vein of form. In the final weeks of the Championship, with Hull fighting hard to make the play-offs, McBurnie stepped up and scored five goals in five games.

Nobody is expecting him to play for Scotland ever again, but if Clarke has already closed his mind to Stewart and McBurnie, as seems to be the case, then he's ignoring two players performing with huge amounts of confidence.

The Scotland manager didn't watch Southampton or Hull on Saturday, he watched Findlay Curtis playing and scoring for Kilmarnock against Dundee United.

Shankland (a goal every 152 minutes and a shot conversion rate of 17.7%) is a shoo-in for the squad and a front-runner for the team if form counts for anything. Hirst showed up well in the friendly against Ivory Coast, in the first half at any rate. He looked hungry and powerful, his appetite for work was unmissable.

He was the third Scot who scored in the Championship on Saturday, getting the first in Ipswich's 3-0 win over QPR that guaranteed his club a place in the Premier League next season. He has 11 goals in 44 games for Ipswich.

Hirst scores every 202 minutes and has a conversion rate of 15.5%. Conway (the fourth Scot who scored on the final day of the Championship as Middlesbrough joined Southampton and Hull in the play-offs) and Bowie are both ahead of Adams and Dykes in these metrics.

And yet Adams and Dykes are Clarke's go-to strikers. Adams is a certainty to travel and it's almost impossible to imagine the manager going without Dykes regardless of what he's been doing in club football, which is not a lot. He's scored seven goals in 43 games this season for Birmingham and Charlton. He's a big character and a positive presence in the squad but in football terms the case for his inclusion looks desperately weak if you're going solely on what's happening in the here and now.

Luckily for him, his bid for inclusion is probably compelling in the only place that truly matters - in the mind of the Scotland manager.

In the stats, Stewart, McBurnie and Shankland are Clarke's most in-form strikers. The probability is that In Clarke's estimation Stewart and McBurnie sit about seventh and eighth in the pecking order, if he's even noticed them at all.

Bowie probabaly won't go either. Since joining from Hibs he has scored three goals in 11 games for Verona - 50% of their total in that run - whereas Adams has five in 27. Bowie's Verona are 19th in Serie A, Adams' Torino are 13th.

Clarke has done a terrific job as Scotland manager and is entitled to select whoever he wants. There's a weight of evidence urging him to think beyond the usual tried and tested, though. He has options, should he decide to consider them.

Related topics

• Southampton
• Hull City
• Football
• FIFA World Cup
• Scotland Men's Football Team