morrison1982

Pretty sure that was included in the (longer?) highlights shown on the TV / iPlayer.

Celtic are no longer a Scottish team, apparently.

Tough competition.

Jake Mulraney signs a new contract with Hearts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49090296 "The Irish winger, 23, scored 30 goals for the Tynecastle side after joining from ICT last summer." You sure about that lads? Heart of Midlothian_ Jake Mulraney signs new deal until 2022 - BBC Sport.pdfHeart of Midlothian_ Jake Mulraney signs new deal until 2022 - BBC Sport.pdf

Streamlining

Even if you go back to the era when the Scotland men qualified for stuff, we scraped two wins against Cyprus in 1990 qualifying. Richard Gough header in the umpteenth minute of injury time over there, having been 2-1 down.

Chicago White Sox should have more influence IMO.

If you can easily work out which team a journalist supports, they can be safely ignored. That goes for both English and Murray.

Dates don't really clash. Group games are being played on Tuesday 16th, Friday 19th and Monday 22nd. Semi finals on Thursday 25th and the final on Sunday 28th. i.e. no games on a Saturday. Only dates that might clash are the games on Tuesday 16th?

Scotland is hosting the women's under-19s this year; games at Perth, Paisley, Glasgow (Firhill) and Stirling. Northern Ireland is hosting the men's under-19s next year, although it's tough to qualify for that (only 7 places available).

Nope. Vast majority of national football teams represent independent nation states, so they just say that if you're a citizen then you're eligible. FIFA have a rule on top of this that require people to live for five years in their "new" country before playing internationally. Different nation states have different citizenship rules. Some allow people with grandparents born there to become citizens (e.g. Ireland), others don't. Most states allow people to become citizens by naturalisation, so that's how you sometimes get Brazilians turning out for Qatar, UAE, etc. This all means that the "rules" for other national teams can be quite different, e.g. it would be impossible for an adult to naturalise as a British citizen and then play for one of the home nations. It is possible for a child to naturalise and then play, under the education rule that was brought in about 10 years ago (e.g. Jordan Rhodes).

The home nations need to have "arbitrary" rules because otherwise each national team could pick whichever player with a British passport they liked, irrespective of their personal circumstances and ties (or lack of them) to that country.

Graham Alexander was probably the most committed Scotland player of the last 20 years at least. Born down south, never played in Scotland, and didn't even play at a high level in England until later in his career. His dad was Scottish and he saw it as the biggest honour he could realistically achieve. Worked his way up to Preston and started getting picked when he was 30, when most players are about to chuck it. Made himself a regular and ended up with 40 caps, was a big part of the improvement under Smith / McLeish (first spell).

Pretty sure McLeish was welcomed the first time, as well. He'd had a bad season to finish at Rangers, but he had a pretty good track record up to then and even that bad season didn't look so bad when Le Guen came in and made a right hash of it. Also there was a feeling that McLeish was a "safe pair of hands" to keep going with the momentum started by Smith in the Euro 2008 qualifiers. Strachan was universally welcomed - the TA had put up a "Strachan SOS" banner at Levein's last game.

It sounds like he's had that kind of season at Sunderland. Showed some promise, but missed too many games due to injury. They irritated Ross to the point where he signed another midfielder (Leadbitter), who has mostly kept McGeouch out of the team since then.