JACKSON: STORY LIKE NO OTHER
Hampden at its crazy best
FINALLY, something even more unpredictable then Scotland’s weather. Scotland’s football team.
A week that began with snowstorms and a draw with Canada which sent a chill down the spine of the nation ended with two days of summer in the middle of March and a World Cup win to warm its heart.
Seriously, how are we supposed to make any sense of this preposterous turn of events? It could only happen here in the kind of madhouse of a country which gets the taps aff while there’s still grit on the pavements from the last blast of winter.
This was supposed to be the night when Gordon Strachan walked off into the sunset for the final time on the back of another aborted mission to actually qualify for something. Anything.
Instead, Strachan will be going nowhere. Not for now at any rate.
This was the night when Scotland turned its own world upside down. When Strachan’s players found a performance from nowhere. When Kieran Tierney swapped left for right.
When Scotland missed more chances in the opening 15 minutes than they have in the last 15 months of Strachan’s reign.
When half a dozen Celtic players pulled on blue shirts and immediately set about a team wearing green.
And, right at the death, when a player who was suffered the ignominy of being booed on to the pitch with just eight minutes remaining, netted one the most deserved winning goals in Scottish history.
Chris Martin came on to the pitch wearing the No.13 on the back of his shirt. It might as well have been a target given the disgraceful way his entrance was received.
But this just might go down as the luckiest, most significant substitution of Strachan’s entire four years in charge.
Come to think of it, it probably just had to end this way. This was a night when absolutely nothing made sense.
A madhouse? This was Hampden Park at its bats*** crazy best and, when all of this magnificent stupidity was over, it’s no wonder these Slovenians left the place looking shellshocked and bewildered by what had just been done to them.
Well, they should have seen the look on our faces. Because this came as a bigger shock to the rest of us than it did to them.
Since when was watching Scotland meant to provide such fun and exhilaration or evoke such pride and admiration? Or to have such a happy ending?
This was like nothing we had seen before under Strachan.
Had we gone inside with a five-goal lead at the half-time interval then the Slovenians could not have complained or felt even remotely hard done by.
It was at this point that the dreadful thought occurred that this might be, as the old cliche goes, one of those nights.
But nothing could have been further
from the truth. There has not been a night quite like this in the recent history of watching Scotland.
A chaos had been unleashed on top of these Slovenians from the moment keeper Jan Oblak misjudged the first probe of the night, 22 seconds after kick-off, and Leigh Griffiths nearly ghosted in on an open goal.
He faced three shots in the opening three minutes, getting down to his right to claw Russell Martin’s effort around the post, pushing away a Tierney miss-hit and then watching James Forest slash one wide.
This was not the Scotland he or anyone else had expected and before he had time to catch breath he was fishing the ball out of the back of his net after Russell Martin had planted a header past him.
At the time it seemed like a harsh decision by Dutch referee Bjorn Kuipers.
But still, the chances continued to come, like an otherworldly blizzard. And Griffiths was in the eye of this Scottish storm.
One header flew wide, then a hip-high volley – which probably ought to have been a header – crashed back off the Slovenian bar. And moments later his next shot thumped the base of a post.
It was perhaps no surprise then when Oblak took the opportunity to plant a knee into the base of the striker’s spine moments later as the pair tangled under a high ball.
Griffiths got up but the damage was done. His back went into spasm almost as soon as he had returned for the second half and his game was over.
Again, in retrospect, these were more huge moments and perhaps even proof of fate conspiring against Strachan.
It could have been coincidence but as Griffiths departed, walking gingerly around the track, so too did the last bit of Strachan’s fortune.
The chances, which had been so plentiful in that opening period, dried up too as a horrible sense of dreadful inevitability took hold. It turned very edgy very quickly.
Strachan tried to influence matters from the sidelines by introducing more fresh blood from his bench with Ikechi Anya replacing Robert Snodgrass.
And within 60 seconds the next big chance of the night had dropped on to the instep of the winger’s right boot. All Anya had to do was guide it into a huge space at Oblak’s left but he fluffed his lines and curled it into the keeper’s grasp instead.
And at that moment it really did feel as if Strachan’s time was up. As if he might have to quit his position after one of the best displays of his entire time in charge.
Irony has seldom tasted quite so bitter. This was beyond the usual realms of sporting cruelty. No, this was eye-wateringly painful stuff.
That’s probably why the boos rang out when Chris Martin replaced James Morrison in 82 minutes, although it should not be offered as an excuse. A nation’s frustrations were all coming out at once.
But two minutes from time Martin fired his way into Scotland’s heart with a goal that made him an instant national hero.
And so Strachan stays. Suddenly Russia doesn’t seem quite as far off in the distance as it did last week. Beat England at Hampden in June and the entire narrative will change again.
Fanciful? Maybe. But after what went on here last night, anything can happen.