SCOTT BROWN believes Scotland have rescued their World Cup hopes because they are now playing the Celtic way.

The captain of both club and country believes the possession and pressing football which worked so well against England and in the win against Lithuania, which is how the Scottish champions set-up, is again key to tonight’s game against Malta.

For Scotland to reach the World Cup play-off place, they would need to finish with three wins starting this evening, then their closest challengers for second place Slovakia are at Hampden next month, before Brown and his players head to Slovenia for their final group game.

And Brown, who is one booking away from a suspension, hopes the Celtic influence will continue to rub off on all those in dark blue.

Brown said: “We want to keep possession, make them work hard, and we’re lucky enough at Celtic that we’ve got a team who can do that and now we’ve got a team who can do it at Scotland as well.

“At Celtic I want to win every game and we managed to go through last season unbeaten and that now is the aim with Scotland now we’ve been fantastic in the last three games.

“We just need to keep improving and keep working because you don’t want to get too stale because you can start believing your own hype.

“It's been great since Friday after a good performance, the way the gaffer wanted us to play Getting the goals and keeping a clean sheet made it a great night.

“We definitely now believe that the group has something for us. We could do with England doing us a wee favour, right enough. But we take our game first.”

It is has been a decade since Scotland won four competitive games in a row -when they narrowly missed on a Euro 2008 play-off spot, when that team beat Faroes, Lithuania, France, Ukraine

And that is what will need to happen again, with Malta tonight being second in a sequence which would give the Scots a place in the play-off.

Brown said: “The momentum is building and the win in Lithuania was a huge result because everyone said it was make or break for us.

“We managed to step up and win it 3-0 and we need to push on from there. I watched the first Malta game in the house and we had a lot of the ball over there and they’ll sit in and make it hard.

“It took England until the 53rd minute to score their first goal against them so they’re a team who will be hard to break down and they’ll try and catch us on the counter attack.”

Brown help special praise for Leigh Griffiths, so long ignored by Gordon Strachan and now a real talisman for his county.

The Celtic captain said: “The wee man is phenomenal. He’s maturing into a great player. He holds the ball up so well. You say against England when he was able to do that against England even though he was up against £50 million players.

“He’s not the biggest but he was bullying them. His belief is his biggest attribute. He believes he can score in every single game and I hope he does.”