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Just
when it seemed that things were starting to get better for Scotland’s
national side, the draw from hell comes around to deal a swift dig
to the ribs and take everyone down a peg or two. A nightmare. After
all, who the hell wants to go to the Faroes Islands again?
The huge, unwieldy seven team group means that Walter Smith won’t
be short of a game over the course of the next two years as he aims
to take Scotland to the first senior championships since the World
Cup in France in 1998. With that in mind, it’s probably appropriate
that the Scots will need to qualify out of a group that includes
the French.
That, of itself, might not be too bad given that Zinedine Zidane
will bow out after the World Cup this summer, perhaps taking one
or two others with him. The loss of Zizou, the man who has really
made France tick over the last decade, the man who really dragged
them to the World Cup and European Championships inside two golden
years, will be keenly felt but France will continue to be a powerful
outfit, no doubt about it. After all, if you can stick Thierry Henry
up front and Patrick Vieira in the middle, you’ve always got
a chance of winning a game, no matter what’s happening elsewhere.
If France were Scotland’s only tough opponents, things would
be bearable. But then there’s Italy. The Italians are a team
in transition, not quite the feared Azzurri of old, and the way
Scotland set about them in the World Cup qualifiers should give
a degree of hope. Italians so often tend to be the big game players,
responding to the challenge of semi-finals and finals, struggling
to find the motivation they need in qualifiers. Who knows who will
step down after the World Cup, but they’re still likely to
be able to field a side including Buffon, Nesta, Cannavero, maybe
Del Piero and Vieri, Gattuso and, of course, the golden boy of Italian
football Francesco Totti – everyone loves a bit of Totti, let’s
face it.
So two of Europe’s top eight teams are in the group. At least
the draw couldn’t get any worse. Could it? It could. Ukraine.
World Cup qualifiers, winning a group that included Greece, Denmark
and Turkey. With Andriy Shevchenko up front. First side from Europe
to qualify for the German finals. Do you get the feeling that Walter
Smith ran down a black cat on the way to the draw?
Faroe Islands. There isn’t anything Scottish fans don’t
know about the Faroe Islands. The topography of the tiny place is
tattooed across minds, alongside stories of postmen and engineers
putting the day job to one side and going on to make our lives a
misery. It’s not the greatest place to visit either.
It’s probably better than going to Lithuania though, a trek
the Scots face for the third time in a row in qualifying. Their
record against them isn’t too shabby, two wins, a draw and,
somehow, a defeat in Kaunas their lot to date, so on the positive
side, at least they know a bit about them. The same can’t be
said about Georgia, a country Scotland have yet to play a competitive
fixture against. They ended bottom but one in the World Cup group
that Ukraine won, only beating Albania at home and Kazakhstan away,
but also able to trouble the likes of Turkey and Denmark for a draw
along the way.
Finishing in the top two of that group will be little short of miraculous
– it’s going to be hard enough to finish third and so
improve Scotland’s ranking position for subsequent qualification
competitions. Yet some, including Craig Brown, still
find some cause for optimism. The Brown plan is that Italy
and France in particular, Ukraine too, might all nick points off
one another, that there could be a number of draws out of those
fixtures, bringing down the total number of points required in order
to qualify. It’s a nice theory, but if Scotland can’t
take points off those three, it’s all academic.
First things first though. Too often recently in qualification,
Scotland have coped well against the big boys only to have the little
kids sneak up behind and steal their pocket money. If Scotland are
serious about becoming a team that can once again qualify for finals,
that can’t be allowed to happen again.
Put simply, from the six games against Georgia, the Faroes and Lithuania,
Scotland have to target a minimum of fifteen points, a target that
doesn’t leave much margin for error. But that’s the minimum
that France and Italy will acquire, so they cannot fall behind them
against the lesser sides, while hoping that east European rivalry
will also see Lithuania and Georgia raise their game and snaffle
points from Ukraine. If Scotland can keep pace in those games, who
knows what they might do against the best – after all, a better
run of the ball might have brought them three or even more points
from the two fixtures against Italy last time out.
Of course, there is a better hope for qualification. If only France
would install Berti Vogts as head coach...
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