No excuses.. our finals bid stalled on launch pad

Sep 7 2008 Gordon Waddell In Skopje

WE were warned about the dodgy ref, about Macedonian diving and dirty tricks. We were warned about the heat. And they all came.

The mercury nudged 40. Their FA screwed us by selling us short on water. Their striker threw himself the way we knew he would and the ref bought it.

You could have set your watch by it all. But you know what? Sometimes you just have to do things for yourself - and the bottom line is we didn't.

The excuses are there if we go looking for them. But none of them will cover up for the fact that too many passes went astray, too much of the play was one-paced and too many of our players who DO have the ability to influence a game at this level didn't.

Not until it was too late anyway.

Sure, we squeezed the game in the second half and had a couple of decent penalty shouts knocked back.

But in matches like this, in a furnace like yesterday's, you don't want to be doing your graft at the end of the game when you've already jettisoned the bulk of your fuel. You want to burn it at the start and we stalled on the launch pad.

Again, not because they got a dubious free-kick or a lucky break with the goal. Just because we didn't test a team ranked 40 places below us in the world.

It's only one game and it was played in extreme conditions the players should never have been landed with if the beaks had been doing their job right.

The kind of conditions Holland have avoided by playing in Skopje on Wednesday night.

But the fact is this one game has now piled the pressure on us for the trip to Reykjavik.

It was always the risk of a double header away from Hampden to start with that the campaign could be over before it started.

Now George Burley has a lot of making up to do on Wednesday if he wants to avoid the kind of start that crippled Berti Vogts from the get-go.

It's harsh. The sceptics have had their doubts about Burley from the off.

The man who didn't speak in big headlines and didn't have the big name or the big personality.

I wasn't one of them. I thought he deserved better.

Sometimes you wondered just what it would take for him to get the benefit of the doubt, to get the respect afforded to Walter Smith and Alex McLeish before him instead of a question mark hanging above his head.

The answer? A result. Plain and simple.

A result in a game that finally meant something.

It's the only way to judge people. And eight months on from the day he was wheeled out at Hampden this was the manager's chance.

In fairness, he didn't have many options to pull a rabbit from the hat. Most of his big decisions had been made for him.

Deprived of arguably his two most influential players - Alan Hutton and Barry Ferguson - any chance of a surprise package disappeared when James Morrison didn't make the crock cut. After that? The team picked itself.

And you can't say Burley did not give it a go.

From the common sense of setting up the warm-up in the shade of the main stand, to the water, to physio Michael McBride misting the players with a cool spray during breaks, the organisation can't be faulted.

The shape of the team was attacking, his subs all designed to have an impact.

But ultimately the players didn't give him what he needed.

And his biggest problem now is he can't exactly go back to the drawing board for Wednesday, can he?

He can't magic up two or three starters from nowhere. Fair or not, Burley is up against it.

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje. The Scotland boss could use some of her divine inspiration right now.