Its still beyond me how you were incapable of qualifying.
Didnt watch any of your games other than the home game against England. So i don't know what really happened there.
The fucked up thing is that we didn't have awful WC qualifications. We were still better than Portugal, France etc, but sometimes, as it was in our case, it's not enough.
We finished the qualifications with 6-2-2, our only 2 defeats coming from England and our only 2 draws against Ukraine.
The English were better than us whichever way you look at it. They did to us what we did to them in the previous qualifications. But even with a superior England, all we needed to do was to beat home and away the worst 3 teams in the group (which we did) and beat Ukraine once.
We drew Ukraine in Ukraine, which isn't really a bad result, but we had to beat them at home. We played 2:2 and we had God knows how many chances, including hitting the post and the bar few times. Normally we could have won that match 5:2, but that night the ball didn't want to go in more than twice so it ended 2:2.
But even this way we could have qualified with a slightly different schedule. We played England 3 rounds till the end while Ukraine had them 2 rounds till the end. By beating us, England secured the 1st place so they went to Ukraine relaxed, without needing to win, and they lost.
If Ukraine played England 3 round before the end and we played them 2 round before the end, things would have been different. The English were gonna go for a win in Ukraine and they wouldn't have lost. England not losing in Ukraine was gonna be enough for Croatia to qualify as 2nd placed. But the English didn't need pts in Ukraine and they lost.