I HOPE Gordon Strachan stays on for the World Cup qualifying campaign but I’m not convinced that he will. The disappointment of Scotland not reaching the Euros will stay will him – and the rest of us – for a while yet. And I just wonder whether Gordon will have the appetite for another campaign where the chances of qualifying for Russia 2018 will be even slimmer than this one.

He’ll be thinking about his own profile and reputation, and what he can now realistically achieve with this team. If we don’t qualify for the World Cup then he might be thinking he’ll probably be hung out to dry by the Scotland fans. He won’t want to finish a glittering career with two failures on his CV. He won’t want to go out like that so I’d imagine he has a lot to think about.

The SFA have already come out and said they want him to stay but I’m not so sure that will be enough to get the manager to sign a new contract. I would be happy if he stays, especially as there are no obvious candidates leaping out as his potential successor. I can see signs that Scotland are becoming a decent team but we still lack a star who can drag us through certain games.

I think we’ve got something about us as a squad but we’ve stalled in this campaign. We haven’t kicked on as I had hoped. We had opportunities and didn’t take them. We need big-time players, ones who can make the difference in a tricky situation, and we need them to do it more regularly. In last week’s column I called for Steven Fletcher to stand up and be counted and he did that by scoring a terrific goal against Poland. But as a squad we continually run into setbacks. We rarely find a way to take something from a bad situation, or to win a match we’re not expected to. And those are the kind of things that seem to stop us from going to the next level.

We didn’t lose to either Poland or the Republic of Ireland over four games so you have to look at the other matches to see where we went wrong. I don’t think you can be overly critical of the fact we took nothing from Germany. Those would have been bonus points. As I’ve said in a few previous columns, you have to look at that defeat in Georgia as the one that hurt us the most. You just have to look at their points tally in the group; six points from Gibraltar and three from us. And they’ve lost every other game. So that tells its own story.

It was a hard group with four teams starting out with a real chance of going through but it still feels like a glorious opportunity missed, especially when you think we’ve beaten and drawn with Ireland and drawn twice with Poland and they’ve both finished above us. That they both beat Germany in the group is maybe where we’ve been unfortunate. I don’t think many folk could have imagined that at the start of the campaign.

I wouldn’t say Ireland are a better team than us technically. They’re all about brawn, muscle and physicality as we saw in the game a Parkhead. They don’t have a lot of players with finesse, it’s more of a typical Martin O’Neill big, strong side. That’s worked for them so fair play but it’s still galling from a Scottish perspective.

We’ve had so many hard luck stories over the years and what happened on Thursday night was just another one. It was a double whammy with us losing the late equaliser to Poland, and Ireland winning at home to Germany. You’ve come to expect anything as a Scotland fan, a pundit, a former player, and a coach but sometimes things still come along that stun you. And that was one of them.

But it wasn’t all just bad luck. In a football sense, we could have done a few things better at Poland’s second goal. Steven Fletcher should have pressed their goalkeeper instead of dropping off, Matt Ritchie didn’t have to get so tight to give away the free kick, and we shouldn’t have let someone like Robert Lewandowski get a run onto a rebound. We should have been bringing the Poles out or staying solid defensively. We didn’t do that or then follow the ball in. So it’s bad luck to an extent but some of the problems have been self-inflicted as well. And the end result is yet more disappointment and heartache for an entire nation.