The Weekend: Scotland the Brave, Wales the Throwbacks & England the Meh

There were mixed results for the home nations in the Euro 2024 qualifiers.

All things considered, it hasn’t been a bad twelve months for Scotland. This time last year, they were just starting to turn their corner. They only had three days to lick their wounds after a 3-0 loss to Ireland in the Nations League on the 11th June 2022, but a 4-1 win in Armenia three days later started to set them back on course. A year on, they’ve won their Nations League group and now sit atop their qualifying group for Euro 2024 with three wins out of three. Since the Ireland loss they’ve played eight games, of which they’ve only lost one, and that—a 2-1 friendly defeat in Turkey in the middle of November—was arguably in their least important of the eight.

When they beat Spain 2-0 at Hampden Park at the end of March, it felt like the sort of one-off result which can be easy to write off in international football against an under-strength team, but travelling to Oslo and coming back with another three points after a dramatic smash and grab win against a Norway team sprinkled with some Premier League stardust has proved that the Spain result might not have been a completely one-off fluke. Short of his one goal from the penalty spot, Nordic Goalbot Haaland was a substantially more benign presence that he had appeared to many Premier League and Champions League defences over the previous ten months.

When Haaland gave Norway the lead on the hour, there had been few signs that Scotland were going to fight their way back into the game in the spectacular way in which they did. A game of few chances left to the impression that his penalty might be the only moment of consequence throughout the entire match. The award was a little soft—it’s tempting to think that Haaland has taken his referee-fooling game to another level since decamping to Manchester City, but this sort of thing certainly isn’t limited to any one player or team, nowadays—but it had been the sort of game which felt as though it would be settled in such a matter.

But there was a little more steel in the backbone of this Scottish team than even their own supporters might have been expecting. They rode their luck, for sure. Their equalising goal, scored by Lyndon Dykes, was a piece of opportunistic finishing which came about as a result of some calamitous Norwegian defending, and with their tails up and just enough time to squeeze out another chance, three minutes later Kenny McLean swept the ball into the corner of the goal at the end of an accomplished break. And while yes, there might have been an element of smash & grab about this performance, it is worth adding that in terms of goalscoring opportunities, Erling Haaland was limited to just the penalty kick all night. There may be a few club teams who could learn a thing or two from watching how Scotland defended against him.

This win puts Scotland five points clear at the top of their group, although the teams below them have a game in hand on them. However, it’s Georgia who are in second place in the group at the moment, and they travel to Hampden Park tomorrow night. A win in that game would make it four out of four, and with the top two qualifying for next summer’s finals in Germany, Scotland could even find themselves standing at the point of qualification with four games left to play. A win from the Georgia match and their next one after that, away to Cyrpus at the start of September, and they’ll likely be more or less there.

It’s certainly a substantially better position than Wales find themselves in after a surprising 4-2 home shellacking at the hands of Armenia. But there are often two ways to look at these things. On the one hand, their first two Euros qualifiers brought a 1-1 draw away to Croatia and a win against Latvia in Cardiff, a perfectly respectable tally from these matches. But on the other, they’d needed a last minute goal to get that point in Zagreb, while their performance in beating Latvia 1-0 was less than inspiring.

But against Armenia, Wales put in a real throwback of a performance, and in just about the worst way possible. Previous losses to Moldova, North Macedonia and Cyprus were suddenly thrust back into the forefront of the memory, but alongside the accompanying thought, “Weren’t they meant to have stopped sporadically doing this sort of thing?” Of course, the obvious explanation to reach for would be the Gareth Bale-shaped hole in their midfield, but while yes, it is obviously damaging to lose your one truly world-class player and talisman, a player who had essentially lifted the team to being more than the sum of its parts, this doesn’t explain their overall slovenliness of this performance, or the fact that their World Cup performance was less accomplished than had been expected.

The upshot of all this is that their trip to Samsun to play Turkey tonight now has all the trappings of a must win game. Croatia are racking up the games in hand, and with two or three games now played and are only three points separating four teams in the group, defeat from this testing trip would leave their Euro 2024 hopes in tatters and quite possibly make the position of head coach Rob Page untenable. It’s all a long way removed from the sunny optimism that greeted their qualification for the finals.

As distance starts to offer a little perspective, it increasingly looks as though England’s 2-1 defeat to France in the World Cup quarter-finals was what it was. A match-up between two of the best international teams in the world that was ultimately won by one of the teams’ ability to convert their big moments and the other team’s inability to take theirs. It wasn’t a sign of the end of an era, conclusive proof of Gareth Southgate’s rank incompetence, or any of the other things that those who delight in England never quite being as good as they want them to be seem to believe.

A Friday night trip to Malta was never likely to ruffle any feathers, but England still made light work of it all. They were certainly helped along the way by an early own goal, but they were three up inside half an hour, the game already over as a contest by this point. There was even time for Trent Alexander-Arnold to score a tremendous goal, which was enough to reopen—and it should be added that there is a lot of competition in this particular field—English football’s most tedious debate, of which position might be best for him and the teams he plays in. On the basis of the evidence of Friday night, I’ll go with “whatever position allows him to absolutely larrup the ball in from twenty yards out, like he did on Friday night”.

But there can be no escaping the fact that a trip to Malta at the very end of the domestic season is hardly the most enticing international fixture of the year, and England have already carried out far more constructive work towards getting themselves to Euro 2024 this year by beating England in Naples and Ukraine at Wembley. But this is really just the grind that comes with being one of the stronger teams in the international game. These matches are always no-win fixtures for England, but at least the hubbub of knee-jerking against Gareth Southgate seems to have receded again. If nothing else, it’s more peaceful.

Wembley is gone. Highbury is gone. Soon the San Siro will be, too. Football has been extraordinarily careless with its architectural heritage over the years, and in light of this we should be grateful for the ongoing presence of De Kuip, the home of Feyenoord and venue for last night’s final of the Nations League between Croatia and Spain.

“The Tub”, so named for its distinctive shape, has changed over the years, but the fundamental shape has remained largely the same, even when substantially upgraded for Euro 2000. In some respects, it was a shame not to see the host nation playing in the final. The old place would have been rocking. But there didn’t seem to be many empty seats and there was a large number of Croatian supporters clearly visible at both ends of the stadium, as well as along the side opposite the television cameras.

And regardless, the Netherlands used their get out of jail free to little demonstrable effect in their semi-final against Croatia, levelling things up at 2-2 six minutes into stoppage-time and forcing an extra 30 minutes that it’s doubtful any of the players, at the end of a long, hard season with a World Cup crowbarred into the middle of it, will have particularly wanted.

But Ronald Koeman’s team couldn’t carry that high through extra-time, and Croatia won 4-2. Earlier on in the afternoon, they lost the third-place match 3-2 to Italy. Koeman has now lost three of his first four matches as head coach of the Netherlands, a dispiriting return to a stadium where he spent three years as a club manager and two as a player, especially coming on top of a 4-0 defeat against France in which they found themselves three goals down in 21 minutes. This is not the return to this job for which he had been hoping.

I say all of this because there really is so very little to say about the actual Nations League final between Croatia and Spain itself. Spain won after a penalty shootout, but only after a goalless draw which meant that the tournament ended with a fizzle rather than a bang, and in the end no narrative about The Surprise Team of The Last 30 Years or about Luka Modric picking up their first international title. Croatia have been to the business end of a tournament several times over, but it’s doutbful that they’ll ever get a better chance than this. And yes, there is a case for saying that could have been said when England were in a similar position, both two and five years ago.