He'll pull up a chair in front of the cameras, the microphones and the lights, and he'll start talking about what's going to happen when the 2014 World Cup qualifying campaign begins tomorrow. At some point he'll be asked if six points are essential from this opening double-header against Serbia and Macedonia, and he'll fight the urge to give a straight answer.
Levein, as savvy as most managers, will see the obvious pitfall of answering "yes". If he says six are essential and then fails to deliver a win against Serbia it will instantly look, by his own definition, as if he is in charge of a doomed campaign. There won't be any malice in the question itself, though. Asking about the significance of two opening home victories isn't so much an attempted verbal trap as an invitation to state the bleedin' obvious.
Doubtless he will find a way of saying something without making himself a hostage to fortune, and hopefully there will be no endorsement of assistant Peter Houston's opinion that four points would be an adequate return from the games on Saturday and Tuesday. Let there be no talk of four amounting to a solid start, or of a win and a draw being an opening for which Scotland would be prepared to settle. Let's hope Levein isn't wishy-washy about things. Scotland need to start with two wins or else yet another campaign will look holed straight away.
Scotland fans are fed up being told that a bad result isn't the end of the world, or that there's plenty of time to make up lost ground. They've been fed that by umpteen managers throughout the 14 years since the team last qualified for anything. Both points are actually true – a 10-game campaign needn't be sunk by dropped points on day one – but only strong teams can make amends for a bad result by pulling off a more impressive one later in the campaign. In recent times Scotland have never been able to salvage anything from a failing position. For nearly a decade-and-a-half they have spilled points here, there and everywhere and never been able to recover.
Defeat or a draw tomorrow – even if Scotland deserve better, or are undone by poor refereeing – will seem like the start of a tired and familiar story unfolding yet again.
There will be the leeway for some points to be dropped in away games later in the campaign, but not at Hampden. If Scotland are going to truly compete for a place at the finals in Brazil then surely all five home games will have to be won. Every away fixture looks like a probable battle. Scotland were beaten the last time they played in Belgium, Macedonia and Wales and they've never beaten the group favourites and top seeds, Croatia, home or away. Tomorrow will be the first time they've faced Serbia at all.
Scotland were in pot four when the draw was made but are now fifth of the Group A nations in terms of the world rankings, which have Croatia ninth, Belgium 40th, Serbia 42nd, Wales 45th, Scotland 47th and Macedonia 97th. They'll have to upset the odds to finish third, let alone second.
If the general view proves to be correct and this turns out to be a group in which "everyone takes points off each other" it could well be the only one of the nine European sections which does not submit its runners-up to the play-offs. The runners-up with the worst record will not join the eight others in the play-offs, and if points are quite evenly distributed in Group A it easily could be the section which misses out.
Scotland rarely start a campaign very well. In the past seven qualifying attempts – every one of which ended in failure – points were spilled in five of the opening games. Every draw or defeat is immediately followed by predictable talk of how the lost ground can be recovered, as if the damage can be comfortably tolerated. It never is. If there isn't a win on Saturday Levein and his players will inevitably suggest the team is good enough to repair the harm by getting a draw or better in Belgrade. Few will buy into that.
There have been so many stumbles and disappointments since France 98 that the level of trust in the national team is low. Hampden will be just about full tomorrow but ticket sales have only crept to that point and thousands will desert the stands for the Macedonia game unless they see three points being secured in the opener. Perhaps the fact many Rangers supporters resent the SFA's handling of their club has resulted in them staying away from the international team, but the slow sales – for a 3pm Saturday qualifier at Hampden – do suggest a general reluctance to get too excited about how this campaign will pan out.
The time has come for the players to justify the encomiums heaped on them by Levein. Whatever the eccentricity and flaws of the Fifa ranking system, the fact that Scotland were 46th in the world when he took over 20 months ago and are now 47th vividly contradicts the manager's frequent claim of great progress and improvement during his time in charge. Six points over the four days would change the perception entirely.
Supporters do not want to hear about what their team is capable of, they want to see evidence of it. They want some boldness on the park and some realism off it. And the latter means no-one should try to fob them off with the notion that dropping a couple of points would be okay.
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