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.