Darren Fletcher admits Wednesday's FIFA World Cup qualifier against Iceland is a must-win game for Scotland after making a disappointing start to Group 9 on Saturday with a 1-0 defeat by F.Y.R. Macedonia.
Playing catch-up
They may only be 90 minutes into their Group 9 campaign but George Burley's side are already under pressure following the reverse in Skopje, and Fletcher acknowledges they must take all three points from their second outing in Reykjavik. "It's now a massive game in Iceland," said Manchester United FC midfielder. "We must go there and try to win, not just get a result. You can't afford to start the group with one point or no points. Although we're disappointed we can't dwell on that in Iceland. We have to win because it's a difficult group with not many games if you need to play catch-up."
Improved performance
With Graham Alexander and Kenny Miller nursing knocks, Burley has added another Fletcher, Hibernian FC's Steven to his squad after the youngster struck twice for the Under-21 side on Friday. He also impressed on his debut, setting up Miller for Scotland's goal in a 1-1 draw with Croatia, and Darren Fletcher believes that results like that, allied with an improved second-half showing against F.Y.R. Macedonia, are cause for optimism. "Looking at the second half, if we perform like that in the rest of our games, we will win many more than we will lose," he said. "We camped in their area for the entire second half and got some good crosses in but just couldn't find that cutting edge to get the goal."
Attacking onus
Burley has failed to win in four matches since taking over from Alex McLeish eight months ago but Fletcher is backing his manager to get it right, defending the decision to move from the pragmatic 4-5-1 approach favoured by McLeish and Walter Smith before him to a more adventurous 4-4-2 formation. "Different managers have different styles but we need to progress as a nation," said Fletcher. "We didn't qualify [for UEFA EURO 2008™] and maybe we need to be a bit more adventurous if we want to qualify in future. We will possibly go with one up in certain games but this one called for two up and although we didn't get a result we came on to a decent performance in the second half. We've got to pick ourselves up and use this in the right way, to get a win."
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