THE collective sigh of relief around a half empty Hampden Park the other night spoke volumes about the importance of the late equaliser achieved for Scotland by Chris Martin.

It kept manager Gordon Strachan in a job and gave us all hope that we might, just might, make it to the World Cup in Russia in 2018 after all.

Now ‘all’ we have to do is beat England in June and win all our other games in the group and yes, we should scrape into the play-offs as one of the eight best runners-up, though that is no certainty given that results against Malta will be discounted in the calculations.

So this is where The Kicker has to fire off a real damp squib because the sheer quality of the teams that we might face over two legs in October to finally make it to Russia is beginning to look pretty overwhelming.

Take Group A for instance. France are in pole position to qualify as winners, but look at the three teams behind them trying to make it into second place. Would anyone really fancy Scotland to triumph over Sweden, Bulgaria or – heavens above – the Netherlands?

Switzerland and Portugal are fighting out the top two places in Group B. That’s European Champions Portugal, currently in second place.

Germany will skate Group C and it says everything that we must hope Northern Ireland and not the Czech Republic end up second. Then again, they did rather well at Euro 2016.

Serbia and the Republic of Ireland look to be on course to fight out Group D, and with Poland just about qualified, it looks like Denmark, Montenegro and Romania for second place in Group E.

Group G is between Spain and Italy – enough said. Belgium should win Group I but would you fancy playing Greece, the current second? Finally we have Group I and Croatia in the lead but with Iceland, Ukraine and Turkey all chasing second.

For what it’s worth, The Kicker fancies the play-offs to be fought out between the following seven teams and the second team in our group: Italy, Portugal, Greece, Republic of Ireland, Sweden, Northern Ireland, Ukraine. Our best hope would be to get drawn against either of the Irish sides, but they are most certainly no ‘gimmes’. If that possible outcome is not a harsh dose of reality then I don’t know what is. Then again, there will be other countries with better players and higher ranking than Scotland which will not make the World Cup finals, so I will not be entirely a disgrace if we fail to qualify, though it will be desperately disappointing yet again.

If we beat England we will have a realistic chance of qualifying for the play-offs. If not, we are out.

But as I have shown, no matter who we get in the play-offs it will be a massive task to make it to Russia. Imagine Cristiano Ronaldo coming to Hampden when we have to beat Portugal to make it and you see the extent of the problem.