EVEN the late great Leonard Cohen would not have written a song about being a Scotland supporter lest his fans felt he’d grown too maudlin.
As Craig Gordon admitted quite openly, the disappointment and despair doesn’t get any easier to take. No matter who many times the goalkeeper has trudged back into the dressing room after another defeat, he will never been desensitised to the sheer horror of it all.
“It gets worse and worse the more often it happens,” said the Celtic player when forced to reflect to Friday night and his previous hard times while on national duty. “I don’t want to feel like this. It hurts.
“I want to make the country proud every time I step on that pitch to represent Scotland. We have tremendous fans – look at the numbers at Wembley – and we wanted points on the board to give them something to shout about. Let’s hope we can do that when the games resume in March.”
Gordon still believes at any rate. Scotland might be fifth in the group, only the mighty Malta are below us, but the 45-times capped man has not given up hope of something quite ridiculous happening.
“We’re not finished – we move onto the next game and try to win it,” he said. “We have a couple of home games coming up and if we get points from then we get right back in it.
“We have to hope England run away with the group and win it and we can fight it out for second place. Trust me we’re still in their fighting and will do our utmost to win the next two. We know we will need a couple of strong performances to get back into it and that’s what we look to do.”
Iketchi Anya is a positive little soul and he was never going to say that all was lost.
A debate to be had is whether Gordon Strachan or a new manager has to now look to the European Championships in four years times, which is quite a thought, and forget any fancily notion of being in Russia.
However, Anya said: “We are still looking at 2018. We are four points off second and have four home games coming up. We are looking to take maximum points from the matches at Hampden. We have England again in the summer which will be a great fixture, and we are not looking any further than qualifying for the World Cup.
“We have got to take 12 points from four games. But that is international football and you have to play with these pressures and that can bring out the best in you, and hopefully it is going to help us.
“We are working hard. You make your own luck. It might have been different if we’d got that break at Wembley. We just have to try to make the fans proud.
Scotland do tend to play better against the bigger teams, Germany, Poland and to an extent England, but fail against the rest. Anya like the rest of us would like to know why this is the case.
He said: “We try our best in every game and I just can’t take explain why this is. Listen, games turn on certain instances and I look back to the Slovakia game when their first goal came from a foul on Steven Fletcher at the other end of the pitch. We lost our focus a bit, they go a goal up and get the crowd behind them.
“Hopefully we can go into the next fixtures focussing on the positives, and we had some on Friday, and right the things we are doing wrongly.”
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