James McFadden will be looking to start Scotland on the road to qualification for the EURO championships when he plays against Wales today in Cardiff. He considers the failure to reach the finals of the the past two major tournaments as "wasted opportunities" due to the quality of the teams they came up against in the qualifying groups. McFadden thinks that the national team let themselves down by not at least finishing second in their qualification group for the World Cup in South Africa and that the players did not do George Burley any favours, with the head coach being the target of the criticism for their failure. Playing Wales in a friendly is no compensation for playing in a play off like the Republic of Ireland this weekend.

Despite being considered as one of the most probable teams to be heading to Africa, Scotland eventually finished a disappointing third in Group Nine having lost 1-0 at home to Holland in their final game. McFadden feels the performance of the national team over the past three years has ultimately not been good enough. He said: "I think the last two campaigns have been wasted opportunities because of the standard of the opposition. We had a great chance the time before last and obviously at the start of the last campaign you would have fancied us to finish second behind Holland, and maybe even push them to try and win the group. But obviously that never worked out. Holland ran away with it and we let ourselves down I would say during the campaign because at times we never played the best that we could have. I don't know why, I just think some games we never played particularly well, other games we did. You need to play consistently well throughout the campaign and we never did that."

The Birmingham man said it would have been "nonsense" to have have considered international retirement after Scotland's failure to qualify for the World Cup, insisting he would be "embarrassed" to have done so. But he did say the players within the international set-up did not cover themselves in glory with the way they performed during the qualifying campaign, insisting they, not Burley, deserved the blame.  McFadden said: "I think the manager took the brunt of the criticism but the players didn't exactly perform to great levels themselves. Us as players, we didn't play as well as we could have done. We're determined to prove that we're good enough and that we can reach the levels that we have done before. We're all getting older and we want to play at the highest level, to play at the big tournaments. First and foremost we're behind the manager, but we need to do it for ourselves as well to prove we're good enough."