Macedonia 1-0 Scotland: A poor, poor start

The Scots’ World Cup qualifying campaign started with a whimper rather than a bang today, as we went down 1-0 to Macedonia. It was frankly a deserved result for the Macedonians, who are turning out in recent years to be a bit of a super-minnow. This is the side that beat Croatia and drew with England in the Euro qualifiers, and we would have been foolish to underestimate them. Still, they were beatable on the day if Scotland would have stepped up to the challenge. We did not, and now any advantage we gained by being a second rather than third seed may be gone.

The goal came by way of an early free kick deflection by Ilčo Naumoski. It was just one of many, many defensive errors by the Scotland back line, and the end result could have been far worse. The midfield lacked any edge, the defense was (admittedly injured but) shaky. James McFadden once again tried to play hero man, and wasn’t far off, but couldn’t quite close the deal.

In this qualifying group in particular, the margin of error is very small. There are only eight matches in the group, only 24 points up for grabs for each team. George Burley, who came in with great expectations but has fallen instead on hard times (Dickens references for the win), predicted we needed 17 points to be sure of qualifying. That is now 17 out of 21 instead of 24.

What all this means is that already, so early in the campaign, the results of other sides in the group become extremely important to us. It’s too early to say that we need help to qualify, but it’s not far from being true. As I write this article, Norway and Iceland are tied at 0-0 after about a half-hour of play. Norway just barely missed out on Euro 2008 qualification, like us, and will be shooting for a high finish in the group, so without being unfair to Iceland, a win for Iceland or a draw would be the best result for us, and either way, we really need to take points from our Wednesday trip to face the Icelanders.