Scotland’s qualifying fixtures released

First of all, hello everyone and welcome to the new Scotland World Cup Blog. My name’s Ian, and I run the Scotland page at our sister site, The Offside. Since we are trying to devote The Offside exclusively to club football, and this site to the internationals, I’ll be posting all Tartan Army related news items here, and all SPL news over there. Thanks for reading.

With nine months to wait, we now have a list of Scotland’s fixtures for the 2010 World Cup qualifiers. It’s an interesting draw, opening with two road matches in four days, and finishing with what should be a screamer at Hampden against Holland. Here are the dates.

6 Sept 2008 - Macedonia v. Scotland
10 Sept 2008 - Iceland v. Scotland
11 Oct 2008 - Scotland v. Norway
28 Mar 2009 - Netherlands v. Scotland
1 Apr 2009 - Scotland v. Iceland
19 Aug 2009 - Norway v. Scotland
5 Sept 2009 - Scotland v. Macedonia
9 Sept 2009 - Scotland v. Netherlands

Obviously, the two matches against the Netherlands are the big ones. We can only hope that this campaign, and its blockbuster finale, go just slightly better than the Euro 2008 qualifiers, which were of course surprisingly positive until our loss to Georgia left us needing a win against Italy on the final day.

As I’ve said before, this is a very open group. Holland is one of the weakest of the top seeds, and is certainly vulnerable. We’ve beaten them before, and in fact have an even record of 6 wins, 4 draws and 6 losses in 16 matches all time. Second place probably buys us a playoff spot, but in order to be sure of a spot in our first World Cup in 12 years, we’ll need to finish top. The third and fourth seeds, Norway and Macedonia, are tricky, and could well play spoiler just as Georgia did in the Euros. Norway finished only a point shy of qualifying for Euro 2008, and Macedonia surprised everyone with a qualifying effort of 14 points that included a win over Croatia and a draw with England. These are clearly teams that can take points out of us.

Nine months remain to sit and ponder these eight fixtures. Scotland will need not only to maintain our fantastic home record, but also to take points on the road, and not stumble in the easier matches. We have a tendency to play up or down to our opponents’ level, and that must stop. Personally, I can’t wait for it to start.