No, Scotland. No Party.

This will be the last post about football for a while, I promise...

As of this morning, the pain is over. Thank goodness! It turns out that all the expectations that a win over Haiti and narrow defeats to Morocco and Brazil would be enough - only one team qualified on 3 points, and with a positive goal difference. We weren't going to achieve that.

But that, and my previous statements that this tournament does actually represent progress, does still mean that this tournament ultimately goes down as a failure. We had our best chance to qualify, possibly the best chance we will ever have, and we failed to do so. Worse, we can't claim that we actually played particularly well in any of our games - the one we won was perhaps lucky, and the other two saw some horrible failings in defense.

So, where does it always go wrong?

To be honest, I think a large part of the issue can be boiled down into two words, "England Expects".

Here's the thing: England always goes into these competitions with a desperate hope that this time will be the one when they finally win it (they probably won't, but I digress). However, they also go in with the definite assurance that they will get past the group stages. That may be arrogance, but it's also not unreasonable. A team of England's size and quality should be progressing.

Which is why, in the one occasion recently when they didn't this led to wholesale changes in how they approached their international setup, changes that led them to turn it around and become the (beaten) finalists last time out.

And that means that while they don't dismiss their opponents in the group stages, they also go into those matches with serious assurance that they'll get the job done.

Scotland don't do that.

Now, in fairness we had an absolutely stinking group to get through. Getting anything from Morocco or Brazil was always a really big ask. But in 2024 our group was Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary. Our 2021 group was Croatia, England, and Czechia. Meaning no offense, but neither of those is the same category of task, and both times we utterly collapsed.

So.

It remains to be seen who will be the next Scotland manager. There will be a task of qualifying for the next Euros (maybe - we might get automatic qualification), and certainly for the next World Cup, and there will be a task of refreshing the squad as players age out.

But I think we also need to stop accepting that just getting to these competitions is enough. The Tartan Army travel in too great numbers, and at too great a cost, for that to be acceptable. So we should be making a statement right from the off: barring another absolute horror of a draw, we Expect to qualify from our group stages - if not in 2028 then 2030 at the latest.

Supergirl

"Supergirl" is a female-led superhero movie, and as such the reviews are utterly useless - there's a loud and obnoxious strain of review-bombers who would have you believe this is the greatest insult to filmmaking ever consigned to the screen, and there's a misguided counter-movement who consequently cannot bear to admit any flaw in the piece. It's really quite maddening.

Supergirl is a character who has had several interpretations on the screen (and, like most superheroes, even more in the comics): there's the "female Superman" iteration portrayed by Melissa Benoist and Helen Slater, there's Sasha Calle's brutalised and damaged version from "The Flash", and here we have Millie Alcock's drunken and messy version. (There's also a version in "Smallville", but I didn't get far enough into that show to see it.) My favourite, generally, is Benoist's take... but I do have to note that "female Superman" is a largely redundant character - it's fine if Supergirl is essentially the only Kryptonian in your shared universe, but doesn't work if you're doing a Cinematic Universe centred around Superman himself. You need something different.

Anyway...

There were parts of this version of "Supergirl" that I really enjoyed, and I thought Millie Alcock was very good indeed in the role. I liked the tone of the piece, and I thought that the action sequences were mostly well done.

Sadly, there was also a significant amount that I just didn't care for. I found pretty much all of the rest of the cast largely wasted - even the usually-reliable Jason Momoa was largely forgettable (though I'm guessing Lobo will appear again...). The villains were bland (more on this later), the secondary hero was wasted, and generally it was just a whole lot of people who existed to take up space. A real shame.

I'm now going to have to go into some spoilers, so if you want to avoid, stop reading now!

There were two things in particular I didn't like about the film. Firstly, Supergirl kept finding herself getting caught out and poisoned, or incapacitated, or poisoned and incapacitated. Once was fine, but this kept happening over and over again. After about the fourth time I really started to get bored - let's just get to the end, please!

The other big problem was the villains of the piece, who were frankly all over the place.

They are introduced as raiders come to shake down a blacksmith to steal some swords - the best ever forged. Fair enough. They proceed to slaughter everyone, leaving the daughter, Ruthye, as the sole survivor. An important note: they were clearly aware that she was there, but just left her.

Ruthye then takes up her family blade, swears revenge, and draws Supergirl into the action. Except that Kara is determined not to get involved - unfortunately for her, Krypto is poisoned and she needs to get the antidote.

Later in the film, having stolen these swords, they then made no use of them whatsoever. Instead, their motivations had changed: they're now an all-male species (how?) who capture lots of young women to be their "brides" and propagate their species. Consequently, they're shown as being quite keen to capture both our heroes.

The key problem with that? Ruthye is the very same daughter that they clearly saw, but just as clearly left alone at the outset of the film. So, really, it would have been much, much easier just to take her right at the start. And then none of it happens.

But the whole "brides" thing is problematic in another way - they're another example of characters existing in the film to take up space, rather than in their own right. As mentioned, Supergirl isn't motivated by this obvious and horrible wrong - she wants the antidote for her dog. Ruthye is motivated by her desire for revenge. In terms of story, both of those are perfectly coherent motives, but they fall somewhat short under the circumstances.

Worse than that, none of the "brides" actually exist as characters. There's one who has a couple of lines (because the script required a reason for a sudden but inevitable betrayal), but barely that.

Thinking on it, it feels like the "brides" were probably added to the script quite late, and so don't really fit with the rest - they probably exist simply to show how beastly the raiders are. And that's fair enough, I guess - they deserved a good punching.

Anyway, "Supergirl" is an okay film. It's not the abomination the review-bombers would have you believe, but it's a long way from being a masterpiece. In terms of similar films, I'd consider it much better than the previous "Supergirl", a little better than "The Marvels" or "Wonder Woman 1984", but less good than "Captain Marvel". It's also much less good than "Wonder Woman", which probably remains the best female-led superhero movie (though itself not without it's flaws).

Thunderbolt and Lightning, Very, Very Frightening

I do quite like thunderstorms, especially after a prolonged spell of hot weather and the high pressure that goes with it - it always feels like a big release of tension, and the lightning itself is very impressive.

Sadly, that enjoyment is marred somewhat by having a dog that is absolutely terrified by the loud noises and bright lights, even with her ear protectors in place, and even given my best efforts to comfort her. Lion did not have a good morning on Friday.

A shame, really. Poor dog.

The Traditional Waiting Game

As expected, Scotland managed to be (deservedly) beaten by Morocco, and then beaten by Brazil. Going into that last match we knew that a draw would guarantee qualification, a 1-0 defeat would almost certainly guarantee it, 2-0 would leave us in trouble but probably okay, while a 3-0 defeat would leave us hanging by a thread.

We therefore promptly registered a 3-0 defeat, because of course we did. We now have two teams confirmed in a better third-place than us, with nine groups to play. By my count, there are three groups that are very likely to end with the third place team below us, with several others in the "maybe" bracket. We now really need Australia to beat Paraguay by at least two goals, which doesn't seem likely.

And the sad truth is that if it does end here, it's no more than we deserve. Yes, we were rather unlucky in our draw (having three host nations all in pot one somewhat skewed things), and yes we were rather unlucky not to get a penalty against Morocco, but fundamentally we kinda knew we needed more against Haiti and just didn't get it done, and against both Morocco and Brazil our defense was suspect (to put it mildly).

I still maintain that this group of players have the ability to do better, and I'm not blaming Steve Clarke for this either (though many will). Fundamentally, I think it's still an issue of confidence: in qualifying they proved that they are worthy of being in the competition, but when it comes to the actual big stage they just don't seem to be doing it.

Oh well.

As I said in my previous post on the topic, even an elimination at this point represents progress: we've avoided being the worst team (which shouldn't be a goal, but after the Euros...), we managed to score a goal, and we managed to win a match. So we go again.

 #19: "The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle", by T.L. Huchu

King of the North

So Starmer is out. I'm afraid I'm not at all sorry to see him go - I've long been of the view that he didn't so much win the last election as the Tories very much lost it (in every sense of the word), and he's been deeply unimpressive since.

And it very much looks like Burnham will be the next guy - having been gifted a very safe seat in the recent by-election he's now eligible to become Labour leader, and he has the great virtue of being untainted with the shambles that has gone before. It's a chance for Labour to make a clean break, reinvent itself, and hopefully change direction enough to fend off the threat of Reform.

Except...

I find myself deeply troubled by the democratic legitimacy of this one. At the General Election we were presented with a Labour party led by Kier Starmer and presenting themselves under a specific manifesto. Switching to Burnham and making a clean break means ditching both of those things. Would people have voted as they did under those circumstances? Would they vote that way now?

And this switch is even more outrageous than even the 'normal' changes in Prime Minister that we've had in the last decade - at least then the replacement leader was someone who had been elected at the same time and under the same manifesto as the outgoing leader, so there was at least some sense of continuity. Burnham doesn't have that - indeed, that's the very key to his relative popularity.

Our constitution doesn't require a change of PM to be followed by a General Election. In practice, however, such changes generally have been followed by one in short order: May was crazy enough to call one after Cameron left, Boris called one after he took over from May, and Rishi only had 20 months left in the parliamentary term before he had to call one. (Truss wasn't in office long enough for it to matter.)

And there are usually fairly good reasons to call one: there's always a "new manager bounce" that comes from having someone new at the helm. Gordon Brown made a critical mistake in refusing to call a General Election when he became leader.

But a General Election now can only mean bad things for Labour - at the very least, they'll lose a lot of seats (because the current Commons arithmetic is a quirk of the system, unlikely to be repeated), and may very well usher in the Reform government of our nightmares.

So he's got an unenviable decision to make: call an Election and suffer for it, or refuse and be dogged by attacks that he's even more lacking in democratic mandate that is usual for replacement PMs. Not a good position.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to this: can the Labour government get the economy working again in the next 3 years? We're in a fairly horrible position where for an awful lot of people things have yet to really recover even from the crisis in 2008, with food inflation, in particular, causing real problems. Meanwhile, wage stagnation has meant that for most work just doesn't pay enough to be worthwhile - the gap between benefits and minimum wage, and between each step on the ladder to the next, just isn't enough for the additional effort needed to climb it.

If that can be addressed, Labour have a decent chance in the next election and should hold off. If not, it's likely they'll see a modest improvement in the polls now and then a continued slide, so their best bet of a win, any win, is basically now.

Either way, I don't actually see any chance of there being a General Election any time soon. But if it really is the King in the North, I'm afraid that in this instance I think there really should be.

Ladies First

This is not the absolute worst film I have ever seen, but it's fair to say that it's right up there.

The film has a well-worn premise: a sexist arse finds himself transported into a world where the gender roles have been flipped, and is forced to learn a salutary lesson in order to get home. That done, he's a new man. Huzzah!

The fundamental problem with the film is that it appears that the filmmakers have spent the last fifty (or at the very least the last ten) years in a bubble, completely oblivious to anything that has happened since. The behaviours depicted were not acceptable even when I started work thirty years ago, never mind following Weinstein and "Me Too". It really undercuts the parody when the thing that is being parodied doesn't actually exist, except possibly in some script-writers fevered brain.

In fairness, there are two mildly funny moments in the film.

Ultimately, though, this is one to avoid. We got it bundled as part of our Netflix subscription, and it still felt like being ripped off.

They Won? They Won!

I didn't watch the Scotland match - with a 2am kickoff it was just too late for me. By all accounts that was the right decision. Apparently Scotland were pretty terrible, and were perhaps lucky to come away with a 1-0 win against opponents that we really ought to have beaten.

All of which means we're probably barrelling towards an unlucky elimination on goal difference. The target seems to be 3 points and a -2 or better goal difference, and if Scotland do get beaten by Brazil and Morocco we'll be at 3 points and, at best -1. Plus, with Brazil and Morocco drawing, they both now know that the winner of the group will be decided by goal difference, so they'll want to put as many past us (and Haiti) as they can.

But...

There are two important mitigating factors to consider. In the previous two tournaments, Scotland have been rubbish in their first game and have then ground out a draw in their second game against, nominally, much better opposition. Well, we've apparently been rubbish in our first game... and a ground-out draw would guarantee our qualification. So I'll happily take that.

But the other thing to consider is this: like it or not, Scotland were the worst team at the Euros in 2024. So our first, fundamental goal for this tournament was simply to avoid that. As much as it sucks, simply not being the absolute worst represents progress. And we've done that. Huzzah, I guess. The next target was simply to score a goal (done), and then to actually win a game (done).

So the target now is to put in the best performances possible (ideally, at least one actually good performance), and we'll see how we go from there. A point would be glorious, even two defeats and qualification would represent our best-ever result at one of these major finals. But if even that doesn't happen... oh well, as long as next time is better again we'll at least, very slowly, be getting somewhere.

And that's not nothing.

Experimental Cookery 2026: Sumac Chicken Drumsticks

These came from Tom Kerridge's book, "The BBQ Book". I don't have a lot to say about them - they were quick and simple, with just a few steps to them (including marinading overnight), and were really nice once they were cooked. All in all, a winner - we'll definitely have these again.

That said, I did find that cooking these on the barbecue was somewhat fraught - I found myself utterly paranoid about whether they were sufficiently cooked or not. Our meat thermometer really didn't help, as it turns out that it just doesn't come up to temperature as it should - I've now replaced it with a better, digital one. But most of the problem was just sheer terror at the possibility that the chicken might not be cooked, even when it clearly was.

Incidentally, in addition to the chicken I also made up two jars of pickles from the same book over the weekend: one of pickled radishes and the other pickled chilli onions. Both of which were really nice, though neither really warrants its own post to say that.

#18: "Sharpe's Storm", by Bernard Cornwell

Warming Up to the World Cup

So Scotland have qualified for the World Cup, and are due to play our first match there for 28 years this Sunday morning. The hype is intense, the excitement is palpable... and I'm not joining in.

Unfortunately, at both the last two Euros we've gone into the competition on the crest of a wave, only to freeze in our first game and get soundly beaten. This was then followed with a plucky draw, a new wave of excitement because "if we can just beat... we could go through", and then another disappointment. There is very little reason to think that things will be any different here, except that Haiti aren't Germany... but that doesn't really matter if our team don't perform.

Of course, one thing that does work tremendously in our favour is that this time three teams will qualify from most of the groups - we're going from 48 teams down to 32 in the next round. So in theory only the truly terrible teams will be eliminated, with one win almost certainly enough to see us through.

And Scotland genuinely, honestly, aren't one of those "truly terrible" teams. On paper, given the group we're in and the form the team has been showing, we should go through and with something to spare. Indeed, with Brazil being a shadow of their former greatness, it's not entirely insane to suggest we could even top the group...

But, no. Because in this context "truly terrible" doesn't refer to the quality of the team on paper, or the form going into the matches, or anything else. All that matters is the next three games, and indeed most importantly the next game (since Haiti are by far the most beatable of the three teams - meaning no offense to them; they'll be saying exactly the same thing about Scotland).

In qualifying, both this time and last time, Scotland proved that they're good enough to be at the tournament. Against Germany they played as though they didn't believe that, and in so doing proved that they weren't.

The big question for Sunday, then: do our players believe that they deserve to be at the party?

Who's Future

I see that the BBC has now announced some big changes for "Doctor Who" - Russell Davies and Bad Wolf are out, they're putting the show out to tender, and they've cancelled the Christmas Special. That last isn't really a surprise. There was just no way to get it all filmed, through post-production, and onto TV for Christmas (at least, not this year...).

But where does that leave "Doctor Who"?

Well, nowhere good. Unfortunately, this means that the return of Russell Davies, the whole of the Disney deal, and indeed the tenures of both the last two (new) Doctors and the last two showrunners have been pretty much disasters. More or less the only good things to come from it is that we've now had our first female Doctor and our first person of colour as a permanent Doctor.

But what next?

If I were the BBC, I think I would immediately be approaching Paul McGann about possibly stepping into the role in the immediate term. If he's willing and available, I would proceed to adapt one or more of the "Big Finish" stories for TV - those are extremely well regarded, they have a script more or less ready to go, so it's something they should be able to get done at some speed. And the 8th Doctor has always been a joy to see and has always been the great "what if...", so let's do it!

If that doesn't work, I'd be inclined to approach Jo Martin about the same, and backfill the Fugitive Doctor story. I'm really not a fan of the Timeless Child stuff, but the fact is that it's canon now, and Jo Martin herself was really good in the role, so they might as well use it.

But if that doesn't work out, I think they have to accept a hiatus, potentially several years in length.

In which case, take your time, cast a whole new Doctor, and start fresh from a "some time later", and completely ignore the Billie Piper appearance - ideally, edit the end of the last episode to have the new Doctor appear in her place and pretend it has always been that way (in the same way that they inserted Ncuti Gatwa in "An Adventure in Time and Space" when they showed that most recently).

Ultimately, though, today's announcement is probably the bleakest news for "Doctor Who" since Colin Baker's firing in 1986.

Annoying Vindication

As I've mentioned a few times, one of my goals for this year has been to fix the garden. This was largely motivated by a desire not to pay to have someone come and do the job - it seemed awfully expensive, and I wasn't entirely convinced they'd quoted for everything we actually wanted.

I've made a start on the task, mostly involving filling in three holes in the garden: one we dug for a sandpit for Lion (which turned out to be a bad idea), and two that Lion dug herself. I also spread grass seed over the affected area.

Alas, this has not had entirely the desired effect, notably because Lion has proceeded to dig great big holes back in the garden. Which is more than a little frustrating.

On the other hand, it does mean that choosing not to spend the money to get it done was absolutely the right decision: as annoying as it is to see her tearing up my work, how much more annoying would it be had we spent a thousand pounds only to see her rip that to pieces?

#17: "The Worst Witch to the Rescue", by Jill Murphy