Mountain to climb: Allan McGregor looks despondent as Spain score their third goal of the night

That particular adventure, with Jock Stein in charge, was one of five successive World Cup qualifications. Anyone who felt blasé about that glorious sequence at the time has now surely been disabused of the notion during the wilderness years following France 98.

We feel the absence so much that we’re now guilty of turning qualifying ties into the finals themselves: both in media attention and among the paying public who travel the length and breadth of Europe to watch the games.

How sad, then, that those same fans had the life and spirit knocked out of them by Spain’s sixth-minute goal.

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