Road to the Alps
3 games into the qualifying campaign Scotland are sitting top of the Group B table on 9 points, 3 points ahead of the second placed French team. This Wednesday’s round of matches see Scotland heading to Kiev to play Ukraine and Andriy Shevchenko, in yet another test to see how far this Scottish team have progressed under Walter Smith.
In what guarantees to be a difficult trip for the Scots they will be hoping to return to Glasgow still leading their group, but to do so they will require at least a point in Kiev with France facing the Faroe Islands in Paris.
So what is the points target to get through to the finals?
For Portugal 04 in qualifying there were 10 groups of 6 teams and we now have for Euro 08, 7 groups.
Scotland is in a group of 7 teams and for the last world cup there were 3 qualifying groups with 7 sides.
The average points total to win the group was 29 points and 25 to finish second.
So the Scots need another 20 points to ensure finishing first from their remaining 9 games, sounds easy but 5 of these games are away from home starting this Wednesday in Kiev. Fortunately they have not lost in 5 away matches since March 26th 2005 at the San Siro in Milan and the last 3 have been won.
So fingers crossed and at 7.45pm on Wednesday we can see how many more points we are still looking for.
