Scotland have done all they can. Now they do the hardest thing in sport: nothing.

There is a peculiar agony that exists only in tournament football, and Scotland are living in it tonight. They have played their three games. They cannot kick another ball that counts. And they still do not know whether they are going home.

On Wednesday in Miami, Brazil beat them 3-0, Vinícius Júnior scoring twice, the second a header at the back post, with Matheus Cunha adding the third. It was a chastening night, and it left Scotland exactly where they did not want to be: three points, a goal difference of minus three, and qualification out of their own hands. This is Scotland's first men's World Cup since 1998, the longest absence of any home nation, and it may now come down to arithmetic performed in other people's stadiums.

That arithmetic is new. This is the first World Cup of 48 teams and twelve groups, and to make the format work, FIFA built in a lifeline: the eight best third-placed sides also reach the new round of 32. It is why a team can lose its final game and still survive. It is also why Scotland are now spectators at their own tournament, refreshing tables, doing the cruel sums of goals scored and conceded by teams they have never played, in cities they will never reach.

Sport usually grants you the dignity of agency. You train, you play, you settle your fate on the pitch. That is the bargain, the thing that makes it feel like the opposite of luck. What Scotland have now is the bargain withdrawn. The work is finished; the result is somebody else's to determine. And so the Tartan Army, who crossed an ocean for this, do the hardest thing a supporter or a player ever has to do, which is wait, powerless, while the outcome is decided elsewhere.

It is worth sitting with how strange that is, because it is also oddly familiar. Most of us spend our working lives believing effort and outcome are joined: do the work and the result follows. Then a restructure lands, or a market turns, or a decision is taken two rungs above us, and we find the link was always partly a story we told ourselves. Scotland are living, in ninety-minute instalments, the feeling of having done everything right and still being unable to control what comes next.

There is no method for the waiting. You cannot train for it and there is no skill in it. You hold your nerve and let the other games play out, which they will over the coming days as the final group rounds finish, each group kicking off together so no one can engineer a result.

England, for what it's worth, sit more comfortably, top of Group L on goal difference with Panama to come. They still hold their own fate. Scotland would give a great deal for that feeling tonight. Instead they have the other one, the one nobody chooses: everything done, nothing left to do, and the result coming for them whether they watch or not.

For your diary: England play Panama in their final group game on Saturday 27 June, 10pm BST, live on ITV1. Scotland's place in the round of 32 depends on how the other groups finish over the next few days.