The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.
There is a version of this — and you'll have heard it, because someone in the pub was performing it at volume before the Morocco result had even cooled — where the whole mess becomes charming. Where the supporter taps the phone, squints at the numbers, announces right, so if Uzbekistan beat DR Congo, and Argentina do us a favour, and England turn up as England should, and then grins the grin of a man who has unlocked a secret door. That grin. It gets passed around like it's wisdom. Wullie is here to put it down on the table gently and tell you what it actually is: it is embarrassment wearing a fancy-dress costume, and the outfit is not fooling anyone sober.
Uzbekistan have not been consulted. That is the irreducible fact. A nation that qualified for their own reasons, with their own story and their own ambitions, has been recruited into Scotland's survival narrative without a phone call, without a fee, without so much as acknowledgement that they have somewhere else to be. DR Congo likewise — filed in our heads as the side Uzbekistan need to beat, which is not a way to think about a football team, and yet here we are. The permutations have been published, which means Scotland are reading about themselves the way you'd read a bus timetable: if the 09:15 runs on time, and the interchange at Central holds, and the connection isn't cancelled, you might get where you were going. Might. The 09:15 is Uzbekistan. They drive their own bus. They always did.
The historical precedent does not comfort and was never meant to. Scotland have stood in this exact doorway before — facing out at a set of results in other games, results required, results not forthcoming — and the pattern is not a mystery at this point. It is a documented condition. One nil to Morocco, a goal in roughly seventy seconds from a defensive lapse, seventy-eight percent possession surrendered in the first half. That is not bad luck requiring a rescue. That is a performance requiring honest assessment, which is harder than picking a second-round team from another group and deciding to love them. The bet is not free. Every permutation that must resolve correctly is a deduction from the account of self-determination, and the account was already not flush.
And yet — and here is the case, finally, because the advocate promised there was one — the permutations exist. Three results required, yes. Three results that are genuinely possible, not manufactured by wishful arithmetic but confirmed by the table as it stands. Uzbekistan are a football team, not a symbol, and they are capable of winning matches. Argentina and England are capable of doing what ranked teams tend to do. Scotland are capable, against Brazil in Miami on the 24th, of winning a football match — which is what they must do regardless of everything else, because you do not sit in the departure lounge waiting for a flight that only lands if you've already packed. The permutations are not the plan. They are the weather. The plan is Brazil. The plan is ninety minutes in Hard Rock Stadium, with the group still open, because it is still open, and a win against the best team in the world is — well, it is something that would not need Uzbekistan at all. Win, and stop reading bus timetables. Win, and the timetable becomes irrelevant.
Stop performing the bewilderment. Take the phone off the bar. Scotland play Brazil on the 24th and the case does not rest until the final whistle — not because the numbers say so, but because they were there in November too, the numbers, and McLean still struck it from his own half in the dark.