Scotland the Brave? Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beasties, more like
It's all over for Scotland after three games yet again, and that valiant underdog tag starts to feel a little wearing when the same thing has now happened twelve times in a row, going back 70 years.
Not for the first time, then, Scotland fall at the first hurdle. It's the twelfth now, going back 70 years to the 1954 World Cup, a record unparalleled elsewhere in the international game, and there comes a point when it's more beneficial to look at what's actually gone wrong rather than pat their supporters on the head and remind them all that at least they had a lovely time.
It is, of course, a good thing that thousands of their supporters can travel to a major tournament without causing any trouble. But why does this mean that they should have to put up with a team that, in all honesty, just isn't good enough to justify that support? It all seems a little patronising, when this is the joint oldest national football team in existence.
It is reasonable to say that the country has a relatively modest population and that this in turn reduces the pool of available players. The population is around one-tenth that of England, for example. But that population of 5.5m is still more than Croatia, Georgia, Albania and Slovenia, and Scotland is a far wealthier country than these four.
And regardless, we can look at Scotland’s performances and see that the shortcomings don’t have to be considered in macro-socio-economic terms. We can just look at the football. Over the course of their three games, they managed just four shots on target, and all four of those came in their second game against Switzerland. They scored two goals, one of which was an own goal and the other of which was about as close as you can get to being an own goal without being an own goal.
There was a time when at least Scotland would fight for their place in the next round. Against the Netherlands in 1978 they needed a three goal win against the previous finalists to squeak through after having taken just one point from their first two matches. They got as close as being 3-1 up before the Dutch pulled a second goal back to finally extinguish their chances.
Compare this with the Hungary match, in which the 99th minute goal that tied the bow on the top of Scotland’s elimination from the tournament might have had echoes of 1978 or 1982 (when Alan Hansen and Willie Miller ran into each other with the score at 1-1 in a must-win game against the USSR) about it, but those echoes were misleading. There was no jeopardy to be found here. No what ifs, no buts, no complaints to be had.
This was, in its own way, always a challenging group for Scotland, in with a host nation looking to clamber back to the top of a perch they seem to have vacated in the last few years, a Switzerland team packed with talent, and a Hungary team what didn’t look as strong as three years earlier but could still pack a punch.
But even if we accept that taking anything from Germany was a tall order, both Switzerland and Hungary were surely classifiable as beatable, and with third place qualifying spots thrown into the bargain as well. The conditions were not completely favourable, but they could have been far, far worse. Consider Albania, for example, in with Spain, Italy and Croatia.
It wasn’t so much the elimination of Scotland from the group stages of a major tournament that was surprising. We had, after all, been here eleven times before, and that’s without even taking into account their decision not to travel to the 1950 World Cup unless they won the Home Internationals even though FIFA, desperate to welcome the home nations back into the fold following their re-entry to the body four years earlier, had offering qualifying places to the top two from that tournament.
It was the nature of the performances that really rankled. Against Germany, they were wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beasties, albeit beasties playing against a team that looked like a plan coming together. Against Switzerland, they were much more impressive—what scientists call the ‘False Hope Parallax’ of the Scotland International Tournament Arc—but still failed to manage to get the win, even after taking the lead.
But even with a win now necessary against Hungary… nothing. Or at least so little until the ten minutes stoppage-time granted to them after their goalkeeper had cleaned out Barnabas Varga, as to give much of an impression that the players even wanted to progress in this tournament. Yes, it’s an achievement that they’ve qualified for the last two Euros finals, but none of that counts for very much when it really does feel as though they’re literally there to make up the numbers.
The size of the population of the country may put a cap on what the Scotland team can achieve. But Scotland supporters shouldn’t be expected to fork out thousands of pounds to travel to Germany to be one of the worst—if not the worst—teams in the tournament, twice in a row and on this occasion without the players even offering much indication of even wanting to be there. It’s profoundly patronising to suggest that they should merely accept the sort of performance that they witnessed in Stuttgart on Sunday night.
So there are questions to be asked, of the management and coaching staff over the way in which the team was set up to play once in these finals, and of broader youth development programmes, when both wealthier countries of a similar size such as Denmark and less wealthy countries of a smaller size such as Croatia have achieved so much more than Scotland have.
It’s not quite good enough to simply throw your arms in the air and cry, “Well there’s only five and a half million of us!” All that really seems to do is give cover to the SFA, who have many questions to answer themselves. Scotland fans are no more entitled to their team winning than any other, but they should be entitled to expect them to give it a go, and this summer they singularly failed to do that. Scotland the brave, this was not.