Scots can turn their pain into advantage and build on the promise of World Cup

Forgive me, proud nation of Scotland, if this feels like the short straw. It's just that you have - not that you stand accused of doing it deliberately - failed to deliver when your cause has been promoted right here in these pages. Perhaps it wasn't so last year, before your whitewash special, because to be honest, any claim that you might in 2015 be about to unleash a 1990 special, one of those walk-out bravura campaigns, would have been a sackable offence.