Mythos and Gyros

It’s been just over four months since Andy Robertson’s last ditch header in Warszawa snatched victory for Scotland against Poland in our final Nations League match and consigned our hosts to straight relegation to League B. That came after John McGinn’s earlier opener was cancelled out by a terrific strike from Kamil Piątkowski.

My voice has just about recovered from finally being able to celebrate a victory over Poland in what is almost 35 years of attending football matches now – stretching back to my very first game, an Italia ’90 World Cup warmup match at Hampden and the ridiculous Gary Gillespie own goal that cancelled out Mo Johnston’s opener. As you can imagine, with my ancestral Polish connection, that win last year was long overdue – especially when you also add in my time following Celtic in Europe where I never got to see a win!

But the job isn’t done yet. Croatia’s draw against Portugal on the same night we were winning in Poland was enough to deny us an even more incredible second place finish and a spot in the Nations League quarter finals. Those start tonight and whilst we’re not in there, we will have one eye on the action at 7.45pm oor time in Copenhagen as Denmark host Portugal in the first leg. We will, of course, face whoever loses that two legged tie in World Cup qualifying.

But we also have our own big Nations League game to play. Having got ourselves into third spot, we now enter the new addition to the competition – a playoff against a League B runner up.

In domestic football where the league sizes are 10 and 12 teams, I’m usually the first to complain about teams that should go straight down getting a “last chance saloon” place in a playoff. But where the league sizes are only four teams, the only way you could have a playoff in that manner is to have the second and third place League B teams play each other for a promotion place, which wouldn’t really work. So in this instance I’m going to accept the slight hypocrisy and just accept that this adds another couple of competitive matches into the international calendar where we’d otherwise be playing relatively pointless friendlies before World Cup qualifying starts in the summer.

Our League B promotion hopeful opponents are Greece, who narrowly missed out on direct promotion when they finished second on goal difference behind England. That mostly came about because England beat them 3-0 in the penultimate group match. A goal from Oli Watkins, an own goal from Odysseas Vlachodimos, and a goal from Curtis Jones all but sealing top spot for England and a return to League A.

But the reason they were in that position in the first place was because they came to England and won 2-1. Two goals from Vanglis Pavlidis either side of Jude Bellingham’s equaliser gave the Greeks a Wembley win.

Those games aside, Greece managed to win home and away against both Finland and Republic of Ireland, and didn’t concede a goal in any of the four games either. They opened with a 3-0 win at home to Finland, thanks to two goals from Fotis Ioannidis either side of a Benjamin Kallman own goal. But as I can’t find footage of that, we’ll move on to the 2-0 win in Dublin courtesy of Ioannidis and Christos Tzolis.

After their Wembley win, they beat the Irish 2-0 at home, with goals from Tasos Bakasetas and Petros Mantalos.

And after hosting England, they won 2-0 in Finland, which again I can’t find footage of but the goals came from Bakasetas and Tzolis.

Whilst they were doing all of that, we were of course digging ourselves out of a hole. That hole started after the late loss at home to Poland where we’d gone two down to Sebastian Syzmański and a Robert Lewandowski penalty, only to get it back level through Billy Gilmour and Scott McTominay, but then blow it in the final seconds with another penalty this time scored by Nicola Zalewski.

We then lost to a Portugal turnaround in Lisbon. After Scott McTominay had given us an early lead, Bruno Fernandes levelled the game and Cristiano Ronaldo got a late winner.

And then we had another turnaround loss in Zagreb. This time Ryan Christie was the one to give us the lead, only for Igor Matanović to level it a couple of minutes later and then Andrej Kramarić to get the winner in the second half.

The goalless draw at home against Portugal finally got us off the mark, and the Hamden pitch flooded in man baby Ronaldo tears.

The penultimate league match saw us pick up our first win of the campaign at home to Croatia thanks to John McGinn’s late strike, giving ourselves that chance which we ultimately took in Poland.

Our past record against Greece is surprisingly brief. We’ve never played them in a friendly match, and actually we’ve only met in one campaign before too. That was qualification for Euro 96, and it’s one 1-0 home win apiece from that. A Stratos Apostolakis penalty was the difference between the sides in Athens in December 1994, in a match which I will always remember the late Craig Brown coming out afterwards and telling us we’d won more corners than them.

The home game in that campaign, I’ll save for Sunday’s second leg otherwise I won’t have much else to talk about! And given we’ve also got Greece in our World Cup qualifying group, we’re going to have to talk about them a lot more in the coming months!

Of course, I’m going to do the usual plug here! If you want to know more about that Euro 96 campaign, including the games against Greece in qualifying, be sure to check out We’re Going to Wembley: Scotland’s Euro 96 Journey by our very own John Bleasdale and Neil Doherty.

The game tonight is a 7.45pm oor time kick off and the best news is that our matches are now free to air live on BBC One Scotland – so no more of that YouTube nonsense that we had to suffer through the league section of this campaign, and no need to subscribe to anything (except your licence fee…)

Good luck to Scotland tonight, and hopefully we set ourselves up nicely for the home leg on Sunday!