Chick Young's view

By Chick Young BBC Scotland football correspondent

If the European Championship is football's version of It's a Knockout, then Scotland played the joker against Georgia.

Last orders were being shouted when Craig Beattie served up one for the road to Austria and Switzerland.

Had Scotland failed to take all three points against the Georgia boys then you would have more chance of eating a Toblerone sideways than of journeying over the Alps next summer.

But what a difference a goal makes.

If in June we beat the Faroes at that sheep station at Toftir where a wayward shot at goal endangers the puffins then it means that we are definitely in the mix for the Group Two shake-down in the autumn.

And whatever else, that will have been a fantastic achievement.

Kris Boyd laps up scoring the opener against Georgia

Let me take you back a couple of Januarys to when the draw was made in Laussane and I watched then boss Walter Smith's chin hit is chest in instalments as one by one the World Cup finalists and then one of the quarter finalists were pulled out the hat to cosy up with Scotland in Group Two.

It was as if they had moved the Andes and the Rockies side by side with the Alps to make sure we had no chance of invading in 2008.

It was unanimously agreed that we would rejoice in self praise if we ended up third or even fourth in the group when the dust settled, a fate, incidentally, which may yet beset us.

But so far we have taken a fleet of bulldozers to every barrier put in the way and the impossible has been downgraded to improbable. By now all bets on Scotland going through in this group should be off. It would seem that is not the case.

Of course strictly speaking nothing has been achieved. When comes to the art of self-destruction Scotland are Picasso class. We could easily paint a picture of doom from here on in.

But maybe it is time-out for a round of thunderous applause at halfway down the road.

It's a Scottish thing, you see. When we plummeted to 86th place in the Fifa rankings shoulder to should with Burkino Faso and others we were shamed. In fact I understand that in Burkino Faso the manager was sacked because he was as bad as Scotland.

Alex McLeish points the way forward for Scotland

And then we soared, a Starship Enterprise of a take-off all the way to boldly go where no Scotland side had been before, to number 16 in the rankings. And furthermore remember that there are now many more nations competing in this than ever before thanks to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other former nations which have fallen apart.

This is a heady place we are now in. And the view is gloriously picturesque, the 16th best nation on the planet, for heaven's sake.

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Except being Scottish we can't quite manage the acrobatics of patting ourselves on the back. It's as if positive headlines don't sell papers, that suddenly these rankings are the stuff of fiction, statistics which are far from vital. Although funnily enough we didn't hestitate to ram them in the face of Berti Vogts when they screamed of our despair.

Scotland are doing all right, you know, although the road to 2008 could be circuitous yet. It is always so with the fate of this little nation.

And remember this. There are no jokers left to play.