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Tired of glorious failure, Scotland's national football team have now opted for abject failure. Barring a miracle, Scotland's previously slim chances of being represented at the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany have vanished. Today we faced Belarus - a team that has only ever won once away from home, and that ten years ago against those giants of world football... Malta. We knew that, for us to have any hope of making the play-offs, we had to win both of this week's games - home against Belarus, and away to Slovenia. Our players also knew that we had to win. They fell at the first hurdle. We were awful, absolutely awful. In fact, we were so bad that we made Belarus look good when they were, in all honestly, little better than average. Watching the game and witnessing our tactical naivete, our inability to retain possession, and our complete failure to close-down their players, I was transported back to the dark days when Berti Vogts was in command of our headlong charge down the FIFA world rankings. For a home game that we had to win, our new leader decided to play with one striker and five midfielders, with one of them sitting just in front of the back four. The holding midfielder was supposed to shackle their striker - a job he absolutely failed to do - not that I blame him for that, because he was being played out of position. We had a centre-forward, whose main threat is his aerial prowess, playing from midfield and on the wing, from where he had no chance of using his abilities to threaten the opposition goal... moreover... have you ever seen a lumbering centre-forward who was able to beat the full-back and get crosses in from the by-line? He should have been in the middle waiting for the crosses. The misery continued as, unbelievably, the manager decided not to make any changes before half-time. After the break, Shaun Maloney was brought on for his first ever national cap. He replaced one of the full-backs, with the holding midfielder moving into the vacated full-back position. Players were moved about, but, in the end, the formation remained 4-5-1. There was some improvement, but not enough, and you would have thought that, with the score still 0-1 with 15 minutes to go, he would have just gone for it by bringing on two attacking players and going to 3-3-4 - we had to win, so what did we have to lose? But no. No more changes were made and the game fizzled out with a whimper. The worst thing, though, is that Gavin asked me if I wanted to go out photographing with him... and I said no, because I wanted to watch the footie.

...and mine too!

Last year it was Hollywood luvvies who were getting on my goat