OLEG ROMANTSEV, the coach of the Russian champions Spartak Moscow and widely seen as a leading candidate to head the national team after the sacking of Anatoly Byshovets, has said he wants the job. They usually say: `It was the best three weeks of my life’.”*Craig Brown’s World Cup Diary (Green Umbrella Video, pounds 14.99).. You get headlines saying `Fans in rage at Brown’ but I haven’t met an angry one yet. Nevertheless, when Brown attended the first annual dinner of the Highland wing of the Tartan Army in Inverness recently, he was touched by the warm reception.”There were 200 there and they were full of praise for our efforts in the World Cup.

But I was impressed by them and keen to see them get into the last eight.”Such sentiments will not, it is safe to assume, be echoed by many of the supporters whose penchant for convivial chaos contrasted so vividly with the boorishness of some who were following England. He is “not convinced” they would have won if David Beckham had not been sent off (unjustly in his opinion). “To watch the BBC Sports Review of the Year you’d have thought England would have won the tournament if only Beckham had stayed on. It wasn’t the best side of theirs that I’ve seen.”By the time England were knocked out by Argentina, also in St Etienne, Brown was back in Bordeaux watching on television in a bar. Suffering Norway’s negative tactics against Italy in Marseilles he could not help thinking of what might have been “The Italians were there to be beaten.

I said at the time that we needed to find a Hamish Zidane or a McRonaldo, but talent tends to come in cycles. I’m confident that we have some fine young players emerging like Barry Ferguson and Callum Davidson. We just need to find some strikers.”Brown returned to France to work as a radio summariser. “In every match we had a penalty turned down which the replays confirm we should have had. I’ve worked at three World Cup finals – with Alex Ferguson in Mexico in ‘86, Andy Roxburgh in Italy four years later and now this one – and we’ve not had a scrap of luck.”But I don’t want it to sound like sour grapes The bottom line is that we weren’t good enough.

We’re a small country and at the moment we don’t have the resources. As for McCoist, I didn’t think he was fit enough, or that he’d done enough in the last two months of the season.”Moreover, Brown still cannot quite believe Scotland’s “bad luck” in France. In each case his answer is the same today as it was in Provence. “Leighton was outstanding for us in the qualifying and his record of 45 clean sheets in 91 caps is exceptional. Norway’s defeat of Brazil meant that even a victory would not have been enough for Scotland to advance anyway, but the inquest went on until sleep could be stalled no longer.Brown had to consider whether his loyalty to the veteran Leighton had been misplaced; and to ask himself if he was right to omit Ally McCoist from a 22 not overloaded with good finishers.

“If you show someone the match stats and ask them who they think won, they say Scotland. We had five corners to Morocco’s one, 22 goal attempts to 14 by them, 14 on target to their nine, and a greater percentage of possession despite being down to 10 men for the last half hour.”The official, fly-on-the-wall video* shows a desolate dressing-room, with heads slumped on chests and Colin Hendry close to tears. Yet it was not a straightforward case of Morocco outclassing Scotland.”That was a weird match,” argues Brown. Norway hadn’t lost in 18 and we ran them into the ground but just couldn’t get the winner. The feeling was that if we beat Morocco and Brazil beat Norway, we’d be through.