Scotland in time zone bubble ahead of Euro 2020 qualifier

The sight of Scotland players milling about in their team hotel well into the early hours of the morning might be disarming to fans, but it is all part of the plan devised by Graeme Jones, the Scottish Football Association's head of high performance.

Jones and his team decided the squad should stay on UK time to minimise the effects of crossing six time zones ahead of their opening Euro 2020 qualifier in Kazakhstan on Thursday.

So Scotland players are eating breakfast in the afternoon and training well into the evening in local time, but have the familiarity of kicking off at 3pm UK time on Thursday with everything geared towards keeping their body clocks normal.

Jones said: We did a huge amount of analysis on where we were coming to and one of the early things we noticed we were crossing six time zones and flying east so you are moving forward in time. And it's a huge strain on your body.

You become lethargic, very tired. Your circadian rhythm - which is your body clock - likes being extended a little so that's why on a night out you quite like staying out a bit longer. But when you cut it short you feel pretty horrific, and it's the same when you are crossing time zones.

It can put you higher risk of injury and illness, your cognitive function becomes less and you are not as reactive. It affects everything.

The rule of thumb, for every time zone you cross you need one day to get back to normal function. We are dealing with elite footballers and we need to be sure they are performing as best they can.

We spoke with a number of different countries and clubs, specialists in different areas, and did a lot of reading ourselves, and it became very obvious that if we stayed on UK time and almost create a bubble effect that we live in, that we are not going to suffer any of the problems that come with crossing time zones.

For anyone else it looks confusing why you are having dinner at midnight when to us it's 6pm. The boys will get up at their normal time, have breakfast at their normal time, train at the normal time, and the most important thing is we will kick off at 3pm.''

Scotland flew out late on Sunday night to allow themselves as much time as possible to get over the effects of the flight.

Jones, who has also had to factor Sunday's second qualifier in San Marino into his planning, said: We flew through the night so the players could maintain the natural body clock by sleeping on the plane. We invested significantly in the quality of the plane so the players could sleep on a flat bed, which they all did.

We invested significantly in the hotel, got black-out blinds, soundproofing in the rooms. So while the players will be going to sleep round about 3am onwards Kazakhstan time, when every local wakes up we will not be affected by that.

Every concept that builds on playing in the afternoon has been considered. It's been months in the making.

And so far so good because the players came off the plane and a few reported they didn't feel like they had been travelling at all. That in itself is a jackpot.

We have had good training sessions so far, and if we can just minimise the factors that could affect the performance, then it creates the baseline of what we hope will be an optimum performance.'

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