Scotland are incredibly within one game of their first men’s World Cup finals since 1998 as Denmark’s draw with Belarus kept their hopes alive after a thrilling defeat in Greece.<\/p>\n
After 63 minutes, the Scots were 3-0 down to the already-eliminated Greeks while the Danes led Belarus at Parken. <\/p>\n
Cheaply given away goals from Tasos Bakasetas, Konstantinos Karetsas and Christos Tzolis had the dream of automatic qualification quashed with the play-offs beckoning in March.<\/p>\n
But, then, the Belarusians equalised. Three minutes later, as the clock struck 65 in both games, Ben Gannon-Doak slammed in his first Scotland goal while Nikita Demchenko fired the bottom side in Group C into the most unlikeliest of leads in Copenhagen. <\/p>\n
As the improbable news reached Pireaus, Ryan Christie nodded Scotland back to within one on a chaotic night – where they had already hit the bar, squandered glorious chances and rode a mountain of luck.<\/p>\n
Denmark drew level to force an even more frantic final 10 minutes in both games, while Greece captain Bakasetas’ second yellow card buoyed a galvanised Scotland.<\/p>\n
Substitute George Hirst had another goal-bound effort hooked away before the Scots were left hanging their hopes on the nation ranked 100th in the world holding on at the home of the top seeds.<\/p>\n
Belarus bailed Scotland out. Now, they are one win away from reaching a first World Cup in 28 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scotland are incredibly within one game of their first men’s World Cup finals since 1998 as Denmark’s draw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-287072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}