When McTominay smashed in Scotland’s second six minutes before the end, he ran away with the nonchalance of a man who was adding a cherry on top of a rich performance instead of settling nerves at the end of a massively fractious game.<\/p>\n
In scoring the 13th goal of his international career, McTominay displayed a cool that belied the stress, but it didn’t last and nor did it deserve to last.<\/p>\n
Belarus had more attempts on Scotland’s goal than Scotland had on theirs – and when Hleb Kuchko nipped in ahead of Robertson to make it 2-1, it was deserved.<\/p>\n
You could argue that they deserved more. A draw would have been a fairer outcome. An away win would not have been a robbery.<\/p>\n
Central to the deal when you come to Hampden is the possibility of palpitations, dizziness and nausea – and so it was again on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Some of the chat leading up to this game involved the gallows humour so close to the heart of most members of the Tartan Army.<\/p>\n
Having put themselves into a highly promising position, with seven points from nine, including a miraculous escape against the Greeks, the fatalists spoke of how typical it would be if Scotland struggled against the weakest team in the group.<\/p>\n
This was, in many ways, a continuation of the fretfulness of Thursday, but against an opponent that had only a scintilla of Greece’s ability.<\/p>\n
Belarus are point-less and goalless in the campaign. Nobody really thought this would turn into such a horrible experience, but they spoke about the possibility nonetheless, teased themselves with the potential horror of it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When McTominay smashed in Scotland’s second six minutes before the end, he ran away with the nonchalance of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-196024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}