Scotland's Footballing Woes

I had the misfortune of having an unexpected free hour last night and chose to spend it watching the second half of Scotland's match against Slovenia. Oh dear.

First things first: congratulations to Slovenia who were very deserving winners - they won the match by being the better team, and I see absolutely no grounds for complaint about the defeat. There have been occasions in the past where Scotland have had grounds to complain about opponents diving or dodgy referee decisions, or whatever, but last night that was very much not the case. And it's not even that Scotland played badly (though we did) - Slovenia played the better game.

But regarding Scotland...

Firstly, I quite like the new style that Sébastien Pocognoli has put in place, at least in theory. One of the big problems Scotland had at the last major tournaments was that they played with very little passion and almost entirely defensively, and the new manager has made a big shift away from that. In theory, that's something I like to see.

But there are two big problems with it.

Firstly, it was very evident that the more attacking style is leaving some gaps at the back. That's probably inevitable, and something we'll just need to reckon with. But that means that when you get your chances going forward, you must take them. Scotland had six shots on target last night, but recorded one goal. That's a problem - if you're going to be wasteful at the back, you need to be ruthless up front.

The second problem is rather more worrying, and looks very much like the Wilfried Nancy situation at Celtic - like Pocognoli he had a very distinctive attacking style that, in theory, should have been easy on the eye and fun to watch. But the problem was that even in the few weeks he was here we saw, again and again, his Celtic team would look good in the first half but find themselves contained by an opposition who were good enough to do that for a while, and then over the course of that first half the opposition manager would get to grips with the style, make a couple of tweaks to their own style, and go out and beat it.

My fear with Pocognoli is that this may well be the case again - that Slovenia basically worked out the beating of Scotland in their first match, or in the first half of the second, and so in the second half last night they just cut Scotland open. And we had no reply.

I hope that's not the case, and that Pocognoli just needs a bit more time to get his ideas across and we can go forward. If not, Scotland may prove to be a team that looks good briefly, and is then decisively defeated by canny manangers.

Beyond that... this Nations League campaign was always something of a free hit - we weren't ever going to top the group, nor were we ever in danger of relegation, so we were always going to be in the same section next time. The one quirk was that coming second would have put us in Pot Two for Euro 2028 qualification, while we're now destined for Pot Three.

But that doesn't make a huge amount of difference, because we're co-hosts of Euro 2028.

The way qualification works (roughly) is this: there are 12 groups of 4 teams. The 12 winners and 8 best runners-up will qualify automatically. Then the top two out of England, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales who have not already qualified will be given reserved spots, and then there are playoffs for the remaining places.

What that effectively means is that we either need the Republic of Ireland or Wales to grab one of those winner/best runner-up spots (in which case we will definitely get one of the "reserved" spots) or we need to do better than one of those two teams (in which case, again, we'll get a "reserved" spot). (It should be fair to assume that England will top their group and so get qualification that way.)

All of which amounts to saying we'll need to be pretty unlucky to fail to qualify (or just rank rotten). Which is by no means a guarantee, of course, but such is the life of a Scotland fan.