STEVEN FLETCHER owes Scotland a big performance and Thursday’s match against Poland would be the perfect time for him to deliver it. We might not have a superstar like a Robert Lewandowski or a Gareth Bale but there are potential match-winners in Gordon Strachan’s squad who play in good leagues and who have moved on for big transfer fees who could do more for the team. And Fletcher is one who comes into that category.

He needs to stand up and be counted, and not just talk the talk. He has to walk the walk as well. I know he scored a hat-trick against Gibraltar, but he’s a £15m player, playing in the Premier League for Sunderland. I want him to take more responsibility and say, “I’m going to score the goals that takes Scotland to a major tournament”. That’s the Steven Fletcher I want to see. I want to see him take the pressure off the others, guys like Shaun Maloney, Steven Naismith and Ikechi Anya who we always look to to get us out of a hole with a goal or a bit of magic.

I think he owes Scotland a turn. We know all about the situation before when Craig Levein was manager and Steven wasn’t in the squad. But now he’s back and starting most games. I like him as a player but I don’t think he’s done enough to be our automatic first-choice striker in every game. So this is his time to stand up and do his bit in what is now a massive game. It’s not about scoring against minnows, it’s about doing it against the big teams and on big occasions.

And they don’t come much bigger than this as we’re now under serious pressure to get a win over Poland. I would have preferred us to have reached a situation where, because of better results earlier in the campaign, a draw would have done us in this one. But we’ve shot ourselves in the foot and we now go into this one knowing that it’s effectively win or bust. I’ve still got a feeling that if Ireland need something from their last two games then they will get it but we just have to focus on ourselves. I fancy us to definitely win our last game against Gibraltar but it scares the living daylights out of me that we probably have to beat Poland as well. We’ve left ourselves with so much to do when it really ought to have been so much easier.

We’ll have to keep Lewandowski quiet, of course, but they have got other good players too so it would be daft to focus just on one guy. Plus we need to find a way to break down the Poland defence as well. So it all has to come together if we are to get the result we need. There are various permutations that could come into play but we’ve still got a right good chance if everything goes the way we hope it will.

But nobody does hard luck stories quite like Scotland. I remember Patrick Kluivert scoring a consolation through David Seaman’s legs against England that stopped us getting out the group at Euro 96. I played in the play-offs against England in 1999 when we should have gone through. And there are plenty more tales like that. We’re the unluckiest team in the world but not making it this time would be the biggest hard luck story of the lot. If we can’t get out a group where three teams qualify given the strong position we were in earlier in the campaign, then this would have to sting the most. It wouldn’t surprise me if we won our last two games only for Ireland to win one of theirs to knock us out. That would be typical Scotland. But we’d only have ourselves to blame.

STEPHEN THOMPSON has a massive decision to make when it comes to picking the next manager for Dundee United and he has to get it right. Jackie McNamara’s time was not great towards the end but people have to look at the overall picture and see what he did for the club. He brought in a lot of finance, got some good results, got them to cup finals and into Europe. That all goes on his CV as a good job. Jackie is a likeable boy and you can’t have a bad word to say against him. He’s just been unlucky that United have sold all their best players in a short spell of time and that didn’t help the manager do his job. Trying to fix that was a bridge too far for him and he’s paid for it with his job.