Steve Clarke is hoping that the pain of missing out on the World Cup last time around will act as a spur for Scotland to finally end their long wait to grace the biggest stage in international football once again.
Clarke has led the national team to back-to-back European Championships, but he admits that the sting of losing out in a play-off defeat to Ukraine for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar still lingers for both him and for many of his players.
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He is desperate to avoid that feeling of regret once more as the Scots kick off their condensed qualification campaign for next year’s World Cup in North America with away ties against Denmark and Belarus next week.
"That's the one we feel we missed an opportunity for sure,” Clarke said.
“Just the whole circumstances around the fact that the playoff game was delayed to June. We were probably missing one or two players that we would have had in the March that we didn't have in the June.
“The whole thing around the start of the war at that time between Russia and Ukraine. Maybe that got into our psyche, I don't know, but certainly on the night at Hampden, they played better than they'd ever played and we played as poorly as we've played in the previous year, and that resulted in us not going to the World Cup.
