Tartan Army face Wales ticket chaos

SCOTLAND fans face a nightmare World Cup ticket scramble, with Wales set to shun their Millennium Stadium and use Cardiff City Stadium instead for the countries’ qualifying clash on 12 October next year.

Tens of thousands of Tartan Army fans will want to go to the game, but they are set to be disappointed. The Welsh FA is ready to use the Cardiff City Stadium and the Liberty Stadium in Swansea to host all of their World Cup games, with the former likely to get the nod for the Scotland match.

It comes after criticism of the giant rugby arena from Welsh players, led by former Celtic striker Craig Bellamy and former Wales manager John Toshack, ironically now in charge of Group A opponents Macedonia. Instead of playing at the 74,000-capacity Millennium, Wales are prepared to lose money by switching the game to the 27,000-capacity Cardiff City Stadium to give them a better chance of qualifying. And with Wales only needing to provide a ten per cent allocation to visiting fans, it means the Scotland support are going to face a massive struggle for tickets.

Wales only played one game at the Millennium in their Euro 2012 campaign, which was a 2-0 defeat against England and have suffered from poor attendances.

The Welsh FA did once of course infamously switch venues to ensure a bigger pay day when they played Scotland. But the 1977 World Cup qualifier at Anfield turned into a massive own goal as thousands of Scots turned Liverpool’s ground into Hampden for the day and the Scots’ 2-0 win took them to Argentina.

The Scots will also face Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Belgium in their Brazil 2014 qualifying group and they learned yesterday that they will play Croatia in Split.

It was initially assumed the Croats would play all their qualifiers in Zagreb, but they have decided to rotate their games. They have opted to face Scotland and Belgium in Split’s 35,000-capacity Stadion Poljud, and will meet volatile neighbours Serbia and Macedonia in Zagreb, with the game against sixth seeds Wales being shifted out to Croatia’s fourth biggest city of Osijek. Scotland are due to travel to Croatia on 7 June 2013, but both FAs are desperate to move the game forward because their season ends before then.

Both Croatia and Serbia are almost certain to agree to giving each other no away tickets for their two games because of the potential for trouble between the Balkan countries’ supporters.