IT was more of a silent movie than an action-packed thriller.
But when the credits rolled, the good guys had won the day.
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And now it’s popcorn out for a proper blockbuster that could decide if we make it all the way to Hollywood.
On a night when every shout to a team-mate, every yelp of pain and every thud of boot on ball echoed eerily around empty stands, Scotland stuck to the script and got the job done.
It wasn’t pretty, even if it wasn’t quite the horrible performance their gaffer had told them he’d happily accept. Fact is, it was pretty damn ugly for long spells.
All that mattered here was the win, though. All that mattered was coming home from a double-header road trip without ruining all the hard work done in Copenhagen three nights before.
One point out of six would have been catastophic. Even two would have been hard to come back from.
Four out of six, though?
I’m guessing most of us would agree that’s one more than we’d banked on from our opening fixtures – and even if a draw between the Greece and the Danes would have been the cherry on the cake, there’s no doubt we’ve put ourselves in a good place.
All we have to do next – and it’s easy if you say it quick – is take revenge over those pesky Greeks on October 9 at a Hampden which will be everything the soul-less, fan-less ZTE Arena was not.
It’ll be a night when the Tartan Army need to release all the pent-up support they were denied a valve for here, to get behind Steve Clarke’s boys like never before.
It’ll also be a night where we’ll need to raise our game several gears from the level that got us over the line in Scrabbletown thanks to one goal scrambled home from almost on the line and a second nodded in by a hapless retreating defender.
Back in March, we were quite simply ripped apart by a Greek side who thought, ran and passed so much quicker than we did. This time, they’re be under ferocious pressure from back home to repeat that display and then some, even more so in the wake of a shock 3-0 home defeat to a Danish outfit who couldn’t get one past us on their own turf.
They’ll feed off memories of that 3-0 win on ours. They’ll also rewatch their opening win over the Belarussians to remind themselves that can play so much better.
If you haven’t watched the highlights of that 5-1 tonking in Athens, you should, if only to realise why we made it so hard for ourselves here.
Right from the off on Friday night, they had four, five, six men inside the box every time the ball was within 30 yards of goal.
They quite literally suffocated the opposition defence, they submerged them. They made their back four and the midfield quartet in front of them camp right in front of their own keeper.
It was ruthless stuff, breathless stuff, irresistable stuff.
No wonder they were four up and cruising before half-time.
Now, compare this to our opening 45 minutes here, when we had 86 per cent possession and made 350-odd passes, but only managed to scramble ourselves ahead via Che Adams as the stoppage time board was about to go up.
Why did we find it such hard work?
Because whenever we had a chance to cross, the man on the ball looked up and saw one, maybe two, pale blue shirts to aim at rather than five or six.
Because although we had the pace and trickery to get behind Belarus time and again, we couldn’t find the kind of killer ball that came easy to those Greeks the other night.
Because we didn’t have that pace, that thrust, which has made our Nations League conquerors one of Europe’s fastest-improving sides.
We’re good with the ball, no question. We zip it around, we know where each other are, we play some really clever stuff in the middle third.
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But what we don’t do nearly often enough is accelerate into properly dangerous areas once that clever stuff creates pockets of space.
For me, that’s what holds us back from fulfilling the potential we undoubtedly have – too many extra touchs, too many pointless sideways passes, the need for everything to be so precise rather than taking the handbrake off and taking risks in areas where we can’t be hurt.
Greece knew that if they lost the ball in Belarus territory with six or seven men up the park, they’d be good enough to get back into shape by the time bang-ordinary opposition got themselves in a position to counter-attack.
Us? For almost half this game, we seemed very aware of looking over our shoulders in case the ball got turned over and it felt like this held us back from getting the really big win that was there for the taking.
But hey, we won. We got the job done, so it’s hard to be too critical.
In many ways, these two game have been a microcosm of Clarke as a manager, the way he got the results he needed in properly difficult circumstances,
What he needs to do now is go hell for leather in a way we so miserably failed to last time against Greece.
His legacy might depend upon it.
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