Craig Gordon: Big win in Greece but Nations League play-off still in the balance

Craig Gordon has warned that Scotland’s Nations League play-off against Greece is “by no means finished” following Thursday night’s 1-0 win in Athens.

Scott McTominay’s 33rd-minute penalty gave Steve Clarke’s side the lead but the visitors had to survive almost constant second-half pressure from Greece to take an advantage back to Hampden Park for Sunday’s return leg.

The Scotland keeper insists there is still work to do before League A survival is assured.

He said: “It is still a difficult game. The tie is in the balance.

“You could see the quality that they have, so still another big performance needed.

“This is by no means finished, it will still be a very difficult one going into the second leg.

“It was a big win. We had to work really hard, especially in the second half to hang on to it.

“But great determination shown by everybody to grind out that second half and stay in the lead.

“We could have been more than one goal up at half-time.

“Maybe the second half would have panned out differently if we had managed to get further ahead.

“But give credit to Greece in the second half, they came out, put us under a lot of pressure and it was a backs-to-the-wall performance that ground out the 1-0 at the end.

“The guys in front were chucking themselves in front of things, it was quite desperate at times.

“Sometimes you have to do that to keep the ball out your net and I thought we did it very well in the second half.”

Many people left the Georgios Karaiskakis stadium talking about 17-year-old Genk-born Konstantinos Karetsas, who came on at the start of the second half to make his debut for Greece after switching allegiances from Belgium, for whom he played at various youth levels.

Gordon, at the opposite end of the sport’s age spectrum at 42, was as impressed as anyone and admits the Scots will have to cope better with the youngster in the second leg.

The Hearts number one said: “He looked fantastic. Someone we will need to look out for in the second leg.

“A great young player but it is about what we do on Sunday to try to nullify that and create more chances of our own.

“It was an impressive first cap for him and thankfully we managed to keep him out.

“We will see what the next game brings and maybe he might get some more minutes but we will have a plan to deal with that as well.”

Gordon insists the performance in Athens demonstrated how important it was for Scotland to maintain their top-flight status in the Nations League.

He said: “You can see how much we want it, we are trying our best to stay there.

“We didn’t start particularly well in League A but we managed to grind ourselves out of it and get ourselves into this play-off.

“We want to try to stay there.”