For Scotland, the end of the
current World Cup campaign can’t come quick enough. For other countries, the
next week will be key to their chances of confirming their place at next years
World Cup.
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| Snodgrass scores in Scotland's away win in Croatia |
It doesn’t take too much to
figure out what happened to Scotland, a hard group and a manager that kept on
picking square pegs for round holes. As
a result, Levein’s teams struggled to keep the goals out and to keep any kind
of prescience in midfield.
Since taking over, Strachan’s
Scotland has looked more solid in midfield.
The centre of defence is still a concern – all of the goals in the
friendly at Wembley came from bad defending at set-pieces while there were
lapses in the home defeat to Belgium.
Scotland could still finish bottom of their group – Wales play Macedonia
tonight before Tuesday’s final group games.
Wales finish in Belgium, Scotland finish at home to Croatia while
Macedonia finish in Serbia.
With the celtic nations already
out, it falls to England to keep alive any British interest in next years World
Cup. Unlike the previous campaigns under Fabio Capello and Sven Goran Eriksson,
England are not quite home and hosed.
Currently, England top their
group by a point. They do have two games
left though, starting with tonight’s game against Montenegro. Both Ukraine & Montenegro sit a point behind
England, while Ukraine’s opponents tonight – Poland – sit a further 2 points
behind. Group H looks as if it will go
down to the wire as England’s last match sees them up against their old
favourites Poland at Wembley.
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| 17 October 1973, England 1, Poland 1 |
There’s not really a Scottish equivalent
to England V Poland, either in terms of the regularity that these teams seem to
meet – they were drawn together in the qualifying rounds of the 1990, 94 &
98 World Cups and for Euro 2000 – that was after meeting at Mexico ’86, or in
terms of the significance of their first qualifying meetings – when Poland
knocked England out during qualifying for the 1974 World Cup – with the tie at
Wembley (above) being essentially the last hurrah for the generation of England players
& management that had won the World Cup 7 years earlier.
Having said that, a win for our
nearest & dearest tonight, coupled with a Poland win in Ukraine, will see
them all but there. Bet you’re already
looking forward to those World Cup special’s already… hmmmm…
At the time of writing, there
doesn’t look as if there will be any major fallers at this point. However, remember that after next week we
will only have 10 of Europe’s 14 qualifiers.
There will be the lottery of a round of play-offs to come. For Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all
that’s left is planning for the next European Championships.
