THE road to Wembley can be a tricky and unforgiving one. So too, as Scotland’s players found out on Friday, is the route that leads away from it. In this case the Road to Nowhere.

An involuntary need to embrace a knee-jerk reaction can sometimes cloud one’s view of the bigger picture. The call for a manager’s head after three poor results in a row – the most recent clearly the most chastening, Scotland’s heaviest defeat at Wembley since 1975 – is as predictable as it is depressing at such an early stage of a campaign.

It is hard to think it was little more than a year ago – just before that night in Georgia – that Gordon Strachan was being lauded for sorting out a hapless Scotland side that had glorious failure written into its DNA and dragging them into the hunt for European Championship qualification.

Strachan’s time left in charge of the Scottish national team may very well be ticking into its final hour. The 59-year-old was unwilling to contemplate the matter as he slipped away in the wake of the 3-0 defeat to England. At least publicly.

However, while his future in the job may be shrouded in ambiguity, his motivation to try to make this group of players succeed is not.

As one slightly inebriated Scot so eloquently put it while bouncing along Wembley Way last night looking like an extra from Braveheart: “They just don’t understand.”

It was a nod to his English cousins, supposedly far from content with their own lot, even though they now seem on the straight and narrow path to World Cup qualification. A feeling of care-free indifference lost on a generation of Scotland supporters, many of whom have known nothing but near misses and monumental catastrophe when following their national team.

The same can be said for this entire Scotland squad. It is the will to change that has brought Strachan to this point.

Whether he believes he can effect that change will surely be the deciding factor on whether he continues in the job.

“I am 59 years old. It might be different if I was 35, but all I want to do is get people to a tournament and enjoy it,” he said. “I want to get the players to a tournament and enjoy it. That’s all I want. It’s all-consuming and when something is all-consuming it’s very hard to bring something else into it.

“At this moment in time, it’s very hard for me to talk. Trust me, it’s all-consuming, the players, because when you look at them afterwards and tap them on the head you feel like a dad whose kid has been bullied at school or something like that. If you ever get that feeling, it’s not right, and that’s the way I am feeling with these lads just now.

“What I’ve got to do now is go and see my family, make sure they are all right, because they feel for me.”

Strachan did conclude by insisting the campaign to qualify for Russia in two years is still salvageable. His optimism is commendable, as is his loyalty to a group of players that for spells on Friday turned in a performance reminiscent of the best that were seen under the manager during the last campaign.

However, with just four points from their first four games, which leaves them sitting in fifth place in Group F with only the winners guaranteed qualification, it seems a forlorn hope even at this stage that anything can be achieved here.

Still, the man in charge of this group showed little sign of defeatism as he picked his way through the defeat, instead wishing to comfort those under his charge.

“The first person I’ve got to talk about after the game is everybody round about me. It’s unfair of me to talk about myself when there’s people in there really, really hurting. They were the ones that had to run about and hurt. We just come up and watch the game as Scotland supporters and I’m a coach.

“You’ll never understand what it’s like to be that unlucky and have to run about the last 15 minutes just to keep a wee bit of pride.

“They had their pride before it and when the third one went in, it could have been a real nightmare for them.”

ONE of the most frustrating aspects of Friday night was perhaps the way the team was set up. A radically changed starting XI featured Leigh Griffiths in attack, flanked by Robert Snodgrass and James Forrest, while Ikechi Anya and Lee Wallace at full-back offered real pace down the wings in support. The return of Scott Brown in the middle of the park did Scotland’s cause no harm.

They took the game to England in the early stages, raising people’s eyebrows and causing many to ask where this sort of initiative was when Lithuania came to Hampden little more than a month ago.

“Anything they came up with, we dealt with it,” said Strachan. “[For the first goal] the shot and deflection and then it coming back in quick is disorientating, and then what you get is world-class players going and putting headers in the back of the net, where we’ve had headers that go over the bar.

“You feel the world’s against you at that point. But it’s easy for me sitting there. Imagine being out there when that’s happening and having to go again. It’s not easy for them.

“I remember losing 2-0 here and we were sneaking out the door, literally, because it was woeful, inept, no shots at goal. But that was different this time.

“We’ve not got a team like Barcelona or Bayern where you say: ‘That’s our team, you deal with it.’ When I was at Southampton, Coventry, I had to move my team about to play against the big boys. At Celtic it was different, we had the same system every week.

“But we can’t do that, so you have to find out the best way.”

A statement that will not stray far from his mind as the long days, weeks and months ahead pass by.