Oops! We Did It Again
Looks like another Scotland campaign is going to end in failure
Scotland 1-0 Haiti
Scotland 0-1 Morocco
Scotland 0-3 Brazil
Tournament over? Most likely. Certainly deserves to be.
Three tournaments in a row we’ve qualified and three in a row we’ve been shit. Is qualifying enough? I think if you were partying in the USA then you had an amazing experience despite the results never giving you much to cheer for. Next time you’d expect more (and not another 28 year wait but you never know).
The Tartan Army’s reputation aside this has been a disappointment on every level.
The players. Captain Robertson gave the same quote as he did at the last two Euros.
The manager. There’s a reason I draw Steve with a massive heid. Part of his job as a manager at a global tournament, like it or not, is to give instant interviews at the final whistle. You won’t get a more professional interviewer than Eilidh Barbour. It seems respect and courtesy for someone else doing their job was a step too far for Steve.
The pundits. Maybe it was the heat and humidity of Miami that led to the losing of the plot on BBC Sportsound as Tom English ’clashed’ with Killie duo Neil McCann and Billy “Doddsy” Dodds. There’s nothing an ex footballer hates more than being presented with evidence that counters their opinion by somebody who hasn’t played the game. Inevitably Sportsound slipped into Panto mode with an outbreak of WWE Tables, Ladders and Chairs.
So now we wait on results elsewhere to determine if a team that only gained three points and has a -3 goal difference farcically makes it to the knockout stages.
And we can sleep easy knowing that Steve Clarke won’t be swayed by headhunters after his services thanks to the foresight of the SFA In awarding Steve a pre tournament contract extension. No doubt there was a juicy bonus in there too for beating Haiti.
Sighs all round. Your thoughts?
Cheers
Keith
My thoughts?
What did we think was going to happen? As soon as we were drawn in the Group of Doom, three points was the reasonable expectation, and that's what we got.
Of course we hyped ourselves up beyond what was reasonable; of course we did ourselves no favours by winning two warm up games and scoring our entire year's allocation of goals all at once. The 4-4-2 setup was obviously being tested for use in the only game which really mattered, and we decided that the best way to spring it on Haiti was to let them get a good look at it.
Scotland have never won more than one game at a World Cup and that was never going to change this time, so when it turned out that Haiti had worked us out after about 20 minutes of the first game, changing things up a bit might have been an idea. but it's not the Scottish way.
It's not as bad as it looks in the immediate aftermath, but it's also not as good as it could have been. We should never have cancelled the Norway game, incidentally - a cold realisation of "oh crap, this isn't going to work" was definitely needed at that point.
Anyway, let's send the squad out on the razz in Miami for a few days, then if we do by some miracle end up still in the competition, they'd be playing the round of 32 game in the natural state of the Scottish footballer - hungover to fuck and not caring about what happens. We're going to win the whole thing!
If I’d been Ms Barbour I would have smacked the dour bastard then booted him in the plums, horrible way to treat someone.