Scotland fans conditioned to believe in calamitous injustice can savour Steve Clarke's fear suppressers – Keith Jackson

Let's be brutally honest with one another. Deep down somewhere, we didn’t really believe it could possibly end so simply. Or with such joy.

Despite the five wins Steve Clarke chalked up in his first five qualifiers, there was something clawing away, deep in the pit of Scots’ stomachs. They say it’s the hope that kills you but that rule applies differently in our part of the world. Hope has never been the problem – we ran out of that stuff many moons ago.

Rather, it’s the nagging fear of some sort of calamitous injustice waiting to pounce around the next corner that ruins our ability to
actually enjoy the moment for what it really is. We may not have been born with it but we’ve certainly been conditioned to live with it down the years, as Scottish football and our national side have been bumped around from pillar to post like some sort of flea-bitten stray dog.

At times, the sense of cruelty gets to be overwhelming. Which is why the dreaded fear began to grip again on Thursday night from the very moment Scott McTominay was denied one of the greatest, most iconic Scotland goals of all time in Seville.

Cut down in his prime by VAR and a match official at a time when the stakes were at their highest. That, four days on, Serdar Gozubuyuk still feels the need to fudge exactly what shaped his thinking process and lay behind that decision comes as no surprise to those of us who always suspected something like this would inevitably be lying in wait.

That’s got absolutely nothing to do with being a one-eyed, paranoid conspiracy theorist and everything to do with being Scottish. It’s why we can’t have nice things. And if we do, we’re too scared to relax and make the most of them. So it’s easy to understand why a mild sense of