Scotland twice come from behind to stun Czechs

St Mirren Park has not always been the venue for this kind of drama, but it got it on 13 October. Scotland needed to see off a Czech side that had already shown in the first leg they weren't going to make this easy, and for long stretches of the second leg it looked like the Czechs might actually do something about it.

Twice Scotland fell behind. Twice they answered. That's the headline here, not any single moment, because a team that concedes first on two separate occasions in the same match and still finds the net three times is a team that refused to let the tie slip, even when the scoreboard said otherwise.

A tie that kept swinging

The aggregate score, 5-2, flatters the gap between the sides a little given how competitive this one got on the night. Scotland had done the damage in the first leg, but Paisley showed the Czechs weren't just making up the numbers in the return fixture. They pushed Scotland twice into a corner and twice got punished for it.

That pattern, fall behind and respond, has been a theme of this campaign for Scotland. It's the kind of thing that either breaks a team's nerve over two legs or hardens it, and on this occasion it very clearly did the latter.

Sweden now stand between Scotland and the World Cup

The reward for getting through is about as tough as it gets. Sweden await in the play-off final, a side that needs no introduction on the international stage and one that will arrive as clear favourites on paper.

But Scotland have just shown, twice in ninety-odd minutes, that paper form isn't the whole story. A winner-takes-all final against Sweden is the prize for a performance built on not panicking when behind, and that's a useful habit to carry into the biggest game of the qualifying campaign.