Hugh Keevins: What Happens Next?

So what do we do now?

Albania have qualified for the European Championship finals in France next year and Scotland have failed to do so. There's the stark reality of it all.

The only time I ever visited that country, in 1983 with Alex Ferguson's Aberdeen, British planes weren't allowed to land there. We had to bung match stewards in order to get phone calls through to the press box during the match and there were literally no cars on the streets.

The football's clearly improved as much as living standards since then.

What happens next here, in the wake of us being bettered by the like of Albania, is the backlash that is the delayed action consequence of failing to beat Poland at Hampden last Thursday night. That draw will be used in evidence against Scotland's manager, along with the night Gordon Strachan's team failed to record a shot on goal while losing to Georgia in Tiblisi.

And the evidence will be used against Strachan by the habitual malcontents as he debates whether to stay in charge of the national team.

Polls will call for a change of manager while others will remain true to their conviction that Strachan's experience should be retained while outstanding alternatives to Gordon are hard to name.

But it will all quickly become background noise as the domestic scene comes back on tap this weekend. The bottom line is there are no fully competitive international matches for the next twelve months and the state of the national team will quickly go on to the back burner as a consequence.

What happened in qualifying Group D will quickly become a distant memory, like Kajagoogoo.

On Friday night we'll be too busy debating whether a bad result for Aberdeen in the televised match against Ross County in Dingwall will absolutely confirm the wheels have come off Derek McInnes' barrow at Pittodrie.

On Saturday at lunch-time we'll find out if Motherwell have appointed a new manager to replace Ian Barraclough on a permanent basis, and in time to face Celtic at Fir Park in a match that could possibly put Ronny Deila's side back on top of the league table if Aberdeen suffer collateral damage in the Highlands.

And when Rangers face Queen of the South at Ibrox later in the day there is a very strong possibility that the attendance will be higher than that to see Jurgen Klopp's first match as Liverpool boss, away to Spurs at White Hart Lane.

And Rangers don't even play in Scotland's top division. In other words, whether Gordon stays or goes, and regardless of our now twenty year exile from the main international tournaments, life will go on within the framework of Scottish football.

The crowd in Faro to see an utterly meaningless match on Sunday night was phenomenally high for a dead rubber. The generosity of the Tartan Army in leaving behind a five thousand pound gift to a local special needs school was touching in the extreme.

But there are infinitely more people who disregard the Scotland team while they live in a wee, narrow minded, world of their own.

A brief involvement with social media taught me as much last week. The Twitterati who concern themselves with the national team provided days of interesting chat about football, and then it happened.

Someone on Celtic's website tweeted a good luck message to the Republic of Ireland before they played Germany and suddenly the old familiar faces ended days of absence from that public forum and returned to deliver their old familiar bile while bringing an end to quality time. The football ? The national team's plight ? No thanks.

The chance of a sectarian debate ? Yes please.

The Scotland team is not the concern of the country as a whole. But over the course of the next twelve months Rangers will re-join Celtic in the Premiership and that will get the undivided attention of the country at large. Nothing wrong with that in principle. It's just the way it is here.

Football is a cynical old world. When Germany's Thomas Muller says he would be interested in a move to Manchester United because of the size of the wages paid at the highest level in England it re-affirms the fact that players are in it for the money.

Thomas will hardly be living on income support as it is, but enough is never enough.

Never mind the quality of the league, feel the wedge. And so it is with Scotland. The fate of a national team now cast out in the wilderness with no survival pack is all very well and good. But it's not as interesting for the majority as the domestic squabble for supremacy and the bragging rights that go with it.

What do we do now ? Nothing. Not one thing. We get back to my dad being bigger than your dad, and we'll think about Scotland some time in the future.