Who's got time for patience?

No sooner has he finished telling us that the visit to play Lithuania in Vilnius on Friday night wasn't a must-win game than he's at it again with regard to tonight's World Cup qualifier against Malta at Hampden.

Strachan says the fans have got to be patient and not get carried away by the prospect of repeating the five goal drubbing administered to Malta in our first Group F match 366 days ago.

Patience? Who's got time for patience?

Lithuania was a must win match, Slovakia's win over Slovenia proved that it was, and it was duly won by Scotland giving their best performance under the current manager that anyone can remember.

Wee Gordon, with the benefit of retrospect, says he could smell that display coming after watching the positivity shown by his players in training beforehand.

So why was he prattling on about the match not being in the must-win category when he sensed victory was coming all along?

But let bygones be bygones.

We now have no time to be patient because a carrot is now being dangled under our noses.

The prospect of reaching the play-offs for the World Cup finals in Russia next year has now gone from being fanciful to feasible.

But it's a shame being us at times like this.

Wee Gordon doesn't want any of us to get over-excited because he knows that when it comes to heroic failure we've written the book more often than J.K. Rowling.

We are, through every fault of our own, world renowned experts on the subject of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

It's not that we're concerned with how we might contrive to screw up our chances of qualification for the play-offs when they are tantalisingly close to completion.

We're so damaged by life's experience over the last nineteen years of worth of disappointment and under-achievement we've now got ourselves into a state of high anxiety over a holiday resort with a national team that is the definition of mediocrity at best.

Let's examine the evidence.

Malta have so far played seven matches in Group F and lost the lot.

A total of nineteen goals have been scored against them over the course of those games.

The Maltese have managed to score two goals for themselves in the ten and a half hours they have played so far, which means they're into a steady rhythm of scoring every five hours and fifteen minutes.

Not even a Scotland side at its most eccentric, wasteful and abberant could conspire to make a calamitous mess of it at home to one of global football's pieces of cannon fodder.

It's what happens when Scotland take on Slovakia at hampden next month which will determine whether we go into the play-offs or not.

England will do us a turn by beating the Slovaks at Wembley tonight and we will be a point behind the losers as a consequence.

That's what will happen, of that there is no doubt.

However, I'm having a spot of bother with plain speaking at the moment.

On Friday night's Superscoreboard a caller told me that I was guilty of viewing the football world through green tinted specs because I mentioned that six of Strachan's team in Lithuania came from one club, Celtic.

Exactly how is one supposed to preview the match without referring to more than half the team coming from one club when the self belief that club has given its players of late is a massive positive for Scotland?

Another caller then said Stuart Armstrong, who plays for , yes, you've guessed it, did not merit his place in Strachan's side.

This, presumably, will be the same Armstrong who scored Scotland's first goal against Lithuania and went on to be Man of the Match.

Yet another caller said Scott Brown, who plays for a team in the East End of Glasgow, was all washed up as a player and should not have been in the team.

Regrettably, there are some fans who allow club rivalry to blind them to the obvious.

Even more regrettably, there would have been those on Friday night who hoped that Scotland failed to win so that they would soon be rid of Strachan from the manager's office.

We can be an odd lot at times.

But tonight kicks off a more fascinating end to Group F than could ever have been thought possible when Scotland were negotiating the ropey phase of their qualification campaign.

I'm not really sure who actually supports Scotland any more. Some fans of two Glasgow clubs take an ambivalent approach to the national side for personal reasons, for instance.

But this evening, on a school night, Hampden will reverberate to the sound of those who publicly declare their support for the team.

There will be others watching on television who will privately wish that Scotland do well but don't want to say so out loud for fear of causing offence.

The supportive will be suffering from tunnel vision and will be optimistic enough to suspect the light at the end of the tunnel is, for once, not coming from an on-rushing train that is preparing to smash Scotland's World Cup hopes to smithereens

• Hugh Keevins