Scotland manager Craig Levein on edge of the precipice ahead of make-or-break Belgium clash

The chances are that the inscription will include the words uttered by the manager before the start of the current qualifying campaign, when he said: “If you’d asked me two years ago if the group we had could win every game in our campaign, I’d have hesitated and been a little unsure but I think we have a squad now capable of that.”

Defeat by the Group A leaders, Belgium – who beat Serbia 3-0 in Belgrade on Friday night – would leave Scotland with a lamentable two points from a possible 12, one game short of the halfway stage of the qualifiers. In such circumstances it is impossible to believe that Levein would still be in charge when the Scots play a friendly in Luxembourg on Nov 14.

His mantra has been that he has supervised a distinct improvement in the team’s fortunes and that, even if his critics cannot see it, it is clear to him. However, by the single measure that all can interpret, Scotland have played 11 competitive games since Levein succeeded the hapless George Burley three years ago and have won only three – two against Liechtenstein and the other against Lithuania.

Liechtenstein – 155th in the Fifa rankings – remain the only team to have been beaten by Scotland away from home in a competitive fixture, in Vaduz over a year ago. It is this gulf between the manager’s relentlessly optimistic prognoses and the delivery of performance that has brought him to the edge of the precipice.

It is also true that football fortune can be an agonisingly capricious mistress and that, but for an error by one of the German assistant referees, Holger Henschel, in Cardiff, Scotland would quite likely be in third place in the group, two points off the lead. It was Henschel who ruled that when Steven Fletcher headed home a Charlie Adam cross with 15 minutes to go, the ball had gone out of play in flight.

The first TV replay suggested that the official was correct, but a more revealing view from a camera positioned level with the goal line showed that the ball had in fact been at least a foot inside the pitch boundaries and that Henschel was positioned a yard upfield from the corner flag.

Had Scotland gone 2-0 up at that stage of the proceedings, it would have been a body blow to Wales, as some in the Welsh camp conceded privately afterwards.

Instead, the reprieve permitted Gareth Bale to earn and convert the penalty kick that saw Wales draw level and then to unleash the extraordinary left-foot drive that won the match in the final minute of normal time.

It would take a heart of Welsh flint not to allow Levein a modicum of sympathy yesterday when he said: “We have all been in football long enough to understand that things don’t always go your way.

“We have had some hammer blows and this is the latest one. The only we thing we can do is go to Belgium and try to win the game. I feel an injustice but the important thing is that we react in the right manner.

“We have got Belgium and it makes it more difficult because we need to win in Brussels now.”

At least that has been established. When it was put to him on Thursday that he had to impress upon his squad the necessity of a victory in Cardiff, he retorted: “What kind of psychology is that?”

Well, the Scotland players are clear enough about their situation now. James Morrison, whose first- half strike had Scotland in the lead for 54 minutes, said: “We’ve got to regroup quickly or else the group is going to pass us by.

“Basically, we’ve got to win in Belgium. They are probably the favourites for the group and they’ve got some great players but we can’t think too much about it.

“In the first half we created chances. In the second half, Fletcher’s goal was a genuine goal. We’ve been done by the linesman. I don’t know what he saw.

“At 2-0, I think we would have won the game. It was a clear goal so that’s probably the main disappointment from Friday. It was really sore.”

But not anything like as painful for Scotland as the ache of exile from the finals of major tournaments since 1998, a banishment that now looks all too likely to stretch beyond the carnival in Rio in two years time.

Taken from telegraph.co.uk