Kenny Miller admits it was the players who ultimately cost Craig Levein his job as manager of the Scotland team.
Negativity
Midfielder Charlie Adam, who pulled out of this squad through injury, blamed the Scottish papers for Levein's sacking in the immediate aftermath of the announcement, but Miller did not concur.
"I'm sure the people at the head of the SFA will say they have had no bearing on them whatsoever, and I would like to think that's the way it is," the former Rangers and Celtic striker said.
"The negativity comes with results and that's why we feel we have played a big, big part in Craig leaving his job because we never performed in the first four games. It's as simple as that.
"If we had beaten Wales, which again we harp on about excuses with the goal getting cut off wrongly, we probably wouldn't be sitting here talking about this. Whether the press had a big say, who knows?"
Miller, who was dropped for the Wales and Belgium games, added: "We've got to move on and we have got a job to do now, to get a result on Wednesday and restore a bit of confidence in the team and that can hopefully be used to build towards the qualifiers in March and get back into the group."
While Miller took responsibility for the results, he was unable to explain why they were so poor. Levein ended up with a record of three wins from 12 competitive games, two of which came against Liechtenstein, despite some promising friendly results.
"It's kind of funny, we used to do it the other way about, we used to turn up for the qualifiers and not so much for the friendlies," he said.
"I don't know, it's really disappointing because I was really optimistic and confident we could make an impact in this group.
"We beat Denmark, a very good team, we beat Czech Republic in a friendly and we had that good performance against Australia right before the qualifiers, and it only suggested we were going to come into it in good form.
"I don't think Serbia was that bad a performance, but I don't think we performed anywhere near to the levels we can in the three games after that.
"There is not an answer to it because as players we thought we were going to do really well in this group."
