Rio dream is over as Belgians put Scotland in their place

THE result in Brussels, coupled with those elsewhere, meant Scotland ended the night bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.
Craig Levein faces a lot of soul-searching in the coming days Craig Levein faces a lot of soul-searching in the coming days

IT was brave. You have to give Scotland’s players that at the very least.

In fact, at times stubborn bloody-mindedness was just about all that was keeping them going. Well, that and Allan McGregor.

But in the end we were right all along. There really was no hope for them in this cut-throat competition for places at the greatest show on earth.

And – as painful as it is to admit – nor should there be. Because last night Scotland were slapped firmly into their place as perennial international no-hopers by a side which really is going places.

If Craig Levein is right and if this is improvement then we must have forgotten just how bad we used to be because Belgium did not just beat us last night. They battered us. They ripped us asunder.

And then, when they were done, they tossed us away like an empty chip wrapper.

It was the litmus test for which Levein had been waiting. He wanted the rest of us to see what he has in this team. He believed we’d be pleasantly surprised.

But the only remarkable thing about this performance was that Scotland were not completely humiliated by the final scoreline.

At times it was agonising because the distance between these two sides stretched all the way to Rio and back again but let’s face it, we knew that already.

Levein must surely have known they would be way too good for his lot. If he did not then he was deluding himself.

As Scotland’s players checked out an immaculate playing surface before the game they must have been wondering if this was where it was all to end. In ignominy and despair. In Belgium.

You know, come to think about it, this might be the only country in the world that beats us at chip eating.

They shovel them out to the locals in pokes from little huts on street corners – but no amount of mayonnaise was going to take the bitter taste away from Scottish mouths if Levein’s men ended up tossed back into the deep-fat frier for a fourth straight World Cup qualifier.

After all the suffering of Serbia, the misery which followed against Macedonia and the late wailing in Wales, Scotland’s travelling band of kilted natural athletes could not cope with being force fed another vile defeat.

Not here. The birthplace of the sprout. The most dastardly, evil vegetable of them all.

Some of them would have been veterans from the last lost battle here, back in September 2001 when Craig Brown’s qualification hopes for the finals in Japan and South Korea perished on the back of a 2-0 defeat.

That night they danced and sang on the final whistle as if the result didn’t matter to them in the slightest. Back then Scotland regularly made it to the finals.

Well last night they were packed into the exact same corner of the stadium. Older and wiser no doubt. OK, so maybe just older.

If they had learned anything down the years they wouldn’t have bothered coming back. Because this was always likely to be X-rated stuff.

The Belgians launched their onslaught at breakneck speed. They were all over us. Winning every spare ball in midfield and passing it at a tempo which Levein’s men have not got close to achieving in all his time in charge.

But while they were awesome, too many of our players were simply awestruck. And had it not been for McGregor they would have had to have been helped off at half-time for a blast of smelling salts.

They had taken some battering but McGregor had kept them in it with a string of super saves.

Time and again the red shirts came at him, swarming through heaving gaps in his backline but on each occasion McGregor was somehow able to keep them at bay, most notably FC Twente wide man Nacer Chadli who was on some kind of one-man rampage down the Belgian right.

And yet, every now and then, against the evidence of our own eyes, Scotland threatened to nick an opener at the other end.

A Shaun Maloney free-kick which Thibaut Courtois did well to tip away and a second dead-ball effort from Kris Commons which forced the keeper into another save of this jaw-dropper of a first half.

Had any of them gone in then Scotland’s players and fans wouldn’t have known whether to celebrate or make straight for the nearest exit while the going was good. It really was astonishing, head-spinning stuff.

But it couldn’t last. Could it?

Big Christian Benteke thought he’d smashed through at the start of the second-half but his header cracked the top of McGregor’s bar. By now Eden Hazard had been thrown on. Soon after, Everton’s Kevin Mirallas climbed off the bench to complete the full set of Premiership all-stars.

And it was one of them, Aston Villa’s Benteke, who would eventually land the first sickening blow as he powered in at McGregor’s back post to head home from Kevin de Bruyne, just as he had threatened all night.

With Scotland’s legs buckling beneath them the rest was now inevitable. Just two minutes later Vincent Kompany was turning James McArthur inside out before leathering a shot high into the roof of McGregor’s net.

The roof had finally caved in and the road to Rio had never seemed quite so long or utterly pointless.

Taken from the Daily Record