Women’s World Cup: Leanne Crichton vows Scotland will have no regrets in Paris

The last-chance saloon beckons, with Shelley Kerr’s side needing victory at the Parc des Princes to stand any chance of qualifying for the round of 16 as one of the competition’s best third-placed teams.

Crichton is doing her utmost to ignore the permutations other groups could cause and is sure that Scotland will leave everything on the pitch when they attempt to take their maiden World Cup crusade into the knockout stages.

“The objective is the three points and you’d rather be sat at home on Friday having gone home and lost out on goal difference than thinking: ‘we never done enough’,” said the 31-year-old.

“The preparation is the exact same. Of course we would have loved a point at least to give us a cushion but if three points is enough, then three points is enough - you don’t need four or six.

“I’ve had a look at the groups and imagined who would be most likely to take points from who, and who might struggle, but this is tournament football and anything can happen.

“You don’t know how much teams in a comfortable position might change their sides and freshen them up in the last group game.

“So much can happen. If you digest it too much, you then become consumed by the fact that might actually happen.

“For us, if we don’t get three points, then all that will be completely irrelevant anyway.”

With Argentina a point ahead of the Scots courtesy of the sole point they picked up against Japan, a bona fide nail-biter is on the cards in the French capital.

No matter who sticks and who twists first, Crichton is certain that her team have the spirit to drag themselves through the fire should they need to.

The Glasgow City star said: “We can probably all go out and say that we need to keep a clean sheet but that’s probably the biggest cliché in football.

“If we all had that same game plan, the minute you concede, your game plan’s then gone.

“We need to bigger than that. We need to be better than that. We need to be prepared that if you do concede, you need to go again and you need to perform very quickly after that. I think you’ll see that.

“We’ve taken our chances when they’ve been there. What we need to do is make sure that we create more because the percentages in this team and the conversion rate, with the players and the quality that we’ve got in that final third; we know that we’ve got goals in the team.”

As a regular pundit herself, Crichton says that the Scotland camp have shrugged off former United States goalkeeper Hope Solo’s savage criticism of head coach Kerr’s tactics.

The former World Cup winner slammed Kerr as she worked as part of the BBC’s punditry team during Friday’s 2-1 loss to Japan in Rennes – but Crichton and co are unmoved. “I’ve sat on the other side of punditry and commentary, and we can all offer an opinion. That’s the beauty of football if you’re asked to do that job and you have an opinion to share,” she said.

“We know who Hope Solo is. She’s very outspoken and very opinionated. She has been her whole career.

“It is water off a duck’s back for Shelley, is it water off a duck’s back for us? Of course it is because that’s one person who has that opinion and sees the game the way she sees it.

“And she’s entitled to her opinion. That’s why she’s there. That’s why she’s probably being paid good money, to share her opinion.

“Does it affect the team? No.”

• SSE, the energy behind Scottish women’s and girls’ football. Official partner of the Scotland Women’s International team and proud sponsor of the SSE Soccer Centres and the SSE Scottish Women’s Cup.