Belgium v Scotland: Levein leaving?

Scotland's road to Rio. A dismal football journey.

We got about as far as the five year old who runs away from home and sits down under the whirligig on the back green to wait for the bus.

The five year old might have shown more sophistication.

It's hardly a surprise that we looked so adrift against an impressive Belgium. In the goalless first half an amazing combination of Allan McGregor's excellence, Belgian profligacy and Scottish luck combined to protect our goal.

Somehow we could almost have nicked the lead.

We wouldn't have deserved it.

The second half wore on. Still we hung on at 0-0.

Could we dare to dream the impossible dream?

No. A rather prosaic opener followed by a moment to savour from a defender.

2-0.

That flattered us. We'd kept the deadlock despite chasing shadows. We were unlikely to hold out.

As I wrote yesterday Craig Levein is a manager destined to fail even when all he wants to do is avoid defeat.

They were just better than us. Painfully so.

We might ask how Belgium have developed such rich talent while Scotland have excelled in nothing more than pedestrianism.

A fair question. A conundrum that the SFA have asked Mark Wotte to solve.

That will take time. Already he's lost a couple of coaches who fans, as innocently concerned bystanders, might have thought would be his key lieutenants.

But we shouldn't prejudge. The Wotte revolution has yet to play out and we can only trust that the people he surrounds himself with, the new and the old, are guided by a great feeling of love for our game.

That's for a new generation, the footballing future we all dream of.

A vision Craig Levein has bought into. He sees a footballing recovery quickened by the input of the national manager.

That's admirable and I've no reason to doubt the strength of his desire to shape our future.

But somewhere between our glorious yesterdays (never hugely glorious) and our golden tomorrows (perhaps not hugely golden) we need a footballing present.

And Craig Levein can no longer play a part in the here and now of the national team.

He's failed.

We're bottom of the group.

He's failed miserably.

12 qualifying games. Three wins.

International football is tough. We accept that. We accept that losing in Belgium is a predictable enough fate for Scotland these days.

We shouldn't castigate Levein for losing home and away to Spain.

But consider this; Lithuania away; Czech Republic away; Czech Republic home; Serbia home; Macedonia home; Wales away.

If Scotland were making progress we'd be winning some of these games.

Certainly winning more than Liechtenstein (twice) and Lithuania at home.

The players we have at our disposal should be getting better results.

The manager must take the blame.

Not everyone agrees.

"Change manager but suffer the same miserable fate, for there's more wrong with our game than Craig Levein," they say.

They're right. There is more than Craig Levein wrong with Scottish football.

But when a man isn't tired of the mediocrity of Craig Levein's national side, he is tired of Scotland as a football team of any worth.

I'm not tired of Scotland.

I remember our last five major championship appearances.

Craig Levein was tasked with getting us closer to those halcyon days.

He's failed.

A decent guy who cares about Scotland, wants us to thrive, wants to contribute to our footballing future.

That's Craig Levein.

But he's also a failure.

And failure can only be rewarded with dismissal.

Will the SFA sack Craig Levein?

Scotland's next qualifier is in March. Levein still has a lucrative amount of time left on his contract, the apparent support of his players and a determination to go absolutely nowhere.

But Scotland are out of the World Cup and the SFA have to sell tickets for a series of pointless competitive games.

All of which makes me think that Levein will stumble on until January before a "mutual consent" press release is sent out from Hampden.

Craig Levein's successor?

A brave man indeed.

We all have opinions.

"Knowledge was divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town, to every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful."

Harsh that. But we'll come up with a lot of names and none of us will have the definitive answer.

Consensus is unlikely.

Levein's great lesson might be that having the guts to take the job doesn't necessarily mean being brave enough to do the job justice.

Belgium v Scotland: Defying the odds

In one of the many radio discussions in the aftermath of Scotland's damaging defeat against Wales it was suggested that we usually pull off one big result in each qualifying game.

A trip to Belgium to play the group leaders would be that sort of game.

It would also chime perfectly with the idea of Scottish football that still just about survives in the popular imagination, of a national team that fails when they're expected to thrive and thrives when they're expected to fail.

The experience of recent qualifying campaigns means that idea of Scotland can no longer stand up to scrutiny.

Liechtenstein twice, Lithuania, Macedonia, Iceland twice. They are the biggest games we've been winning lately.

For the last "big" result we must look back to the qualifiers for Euro 2008 and those two victories over France in 2006 and 2007.

Captain Darren Fletcher has that Scotland can "definitely" beat Belgium tonight.

And we can, of course we can. In a one off match anything can happen.

It's just that there is no evidence that this squad led by this manager is ever going to enjoy that sort of victory.

Having built a squad cowed into timidity because of his acceptance of what he sees as our limitations, Levein has little right to expect the players to come roaring out in defiance in a game he needs to win to have any chance of keeping his job.

He's written his own script. Now he'll need to sit with the rest of us and see how a team whose weaknesses he's inflated and whose strengths he's nullified fares against an extravagantly talented team which is finally, in this qualifying campaign, getting the results its individual components deserve.

Scotland go into this game at 8/1 to win with the hosts at 4/11.

You need to plough through eight Belgian players - Christian Benteke, Kevin Mirallas, Ilombe Mboyo, Jelle Vossen, Kevin De Bruyne, Eden Hazard, Moussa Dembele, Dries Mertens - before you find Steven Fletcher and Kenny Miller on the first goalscorer list, the pair of them joined by Nacer Chadli at 9/1.

That alone suggests that notions of "keeping it tight" for as long as possible is going to be a hell of an ask.

Can we be inspired by those French games? Ride our luck, defend like dervishes, find the inspiration to take and hold a lead?

A 1-0 win for Scotland at 16/1?

How I'd love that to look like a good bet.

But I can't convince myself that it does.

We have to hope that Scotland's players will have been stung by Friday night, a sense, however misguided, of injustice and a desire to save the manager they profess to have so much faith in.

But that would be to discount the inspiration Belgium can take from the momentum they've built up, home advantage and the scent of blood from a reeling Scotland.

A 3-0 Belgium win is priced at 8/1. That's the same as any Scotland win.

Depressingly a thumping of that sort looks more likely than even the narrowest of Scottish wins.

I can't bring myself to bet against Scotland.

So I'll probably plump for 0-0 at 10/1.

But I'll do so with the heavy heart of a punter who knows that even when he sets out not to avoid defeat this is a Scotland manager destined to fail.

All odds from Ladbrokes #gameon

Always remembering www.gambleaware.co.uk