GordonS

And bear in mind you'll have to apply before knowing if Scotland will qualify. £600 for a family of four to sit in the front row of the south stand for Albania 0-0 Romania in their opening matches, anyone? Or even more fun, to watch England win a group stage match against someone that's not us? If they qualify, England would play one match at Hampden, and even if we do qualify there's only a 50-50 chance they'd play us there. Who the hell pays those prices???

Sorry if this isn't the right place for this. Price for the group games and the last 16 matches at Hampden and Wembley: €50 straight behind the goals €125 in the corners €185 North and South stand Prices for the final: €95 for a limited number of "Fans first" seats behind the goals (fewer than 5,000) €295 standard straight behind the goals €595 in the corners €945 long sides. Yeah, no thanks.

Agreed that it's only those who were in with a shot of winning the Junior Cup who miss it. It is a big loss to us though. The three wins I've seen are my favourite club football memories and far exceed winning the league, beating Forfar or giving Ross County a scare. The downside of the Junior Cup was the stupid scheduling, but that can be fixed. The FA Vase is over 40 years old and the FA Trophy is 50 this year. Heritage and name recognition count for a lot. No point throwing away something people already love. I'm sure we all want an all-in non-league knockout competition, might as well work with what we have. I'm not confident that will happen. Who really wants it? In theory they said they wanted to join the pyramid, but when it came to it none of the big west clubs did anything to make it happen. I'm also not making presumptions about relegation from the LL. When is their AGM? If they don't increase it to 2 places from next season, given how strong the EoS Premier is and how many licensed clubs it now has, I'll be pretty sceptical.

Sure, and it's telling that the final this year is in a stadium with a capacity of only 6,000. It's also only relevant if you make the final, or at least the semis. But Hurlford don't have a big support and the kind of Talbot fans that only turn up for Junior Cup finals are getting pretty blasé. I think if there were a Linlithgow v Pollok final now you'd be back nearer 10,000. And even that 5,000 is worth putting in context - how many clubs in Scotland could take much more than that to their equivalent cup final? Only the full time clubs. How many does the South Challenge Cup final draw? The Junior Cup final is a special part of Scottish football's heritage, it's worth renewing it. Sad to see what's happened to Whitburn, but I think it's more than the football club, I think it's symptomatic of the west side of West Lothian generally. Its old, ahem, cultural institutions no longer relevant or popular, public services hollowed out by austerity, reduced to dormitory status by new housing along the motorway corridor, pitifully led by a mean-spirited council that crushes talent and ambition... maybe this is a discussion for elsewhere.

My fevered dream, of the type that people post on the 'if you could start from scratch' forum, is one season of three conferences made up of the Lowland League, the EoS Premier and the West Superleague, to form a LL, EoSL and WoSL in a single leap. That's obviously pretty disrespectful to many LL but there's no doubt that for some it's just a matter of time before they're hauled into the EoS Premier, and a few will likely do back-to-back relegations. We'd get everything sorted in one year and the LL that would be formed would be a cracking league.

I was only talking about those WRSJFA clubs that could expect to be promoted to the LL. With the best will in the world, there's no way it's a match for the West Superleague, nor could it be for several years yet. I'm not convinced that there's a reason to worry about the future of the WRSJFA, at least at the top end. South of the Tay the rump East Region is knackered, traditionally bigger West Lothian clubs are rapidly slipping behind clubs like Blackburn and Broxburn. No local competitors are coming past any of the West Superleague clubs though. From what I read there are problems further down the west region but would those be alleviated at all by joining the pyramid? I can't see a reason why. Yes, the LL will get there, and faster if everyone commits to it. But how many years before it's genuinely interesting for a club like Talbot? At one promotion per season and assuming the SFA don't beat the whole pyramid to death, it'll be 6-7 years at least.

After what Beith did to us, and having seen Talbot, I'm a bit relieved we're not... No, the big Scottish isn't a replacement for the Junior Cup because we're only ever going to be hoping for a good run and the occasional giant-killing, as opposed to those great finals we've had. I think most people who've given it any thought would like to see the Junior Cup opened out to all non-league seniors in Scotland who want to take part but sadly personalties and attitudes stand in the way of that for now. The South Challenge Cup is a good competition, but the name recognition of the Junior Cup is what gets all the shop windows decorated and the open-top bus parade, nothing else could take its place.

And domestically...

I can't pick one. I have to pick two, but they're a double act. Xavi and Iniesta. I'd pay to watch them pass and move all day long. Apologies for the music.

It's a shame for her, if she'd been fit she'd surely have made it. But to only be missing one fairly obvious player isn't bad odds in a 23 player squad, and a damn sight better than we had two years ago.

I thought this would be great for the lassies this time:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/may/20/fifa-womens-world-cup-ticketing-fiasco There was a thread about tickets on the other women's football page, but I suppose this should go here. In scenes that are a surprise to literally no-one in the football world, FIFA has fucked up the tickets. Loads of people are separated all over the place. I've got split tickets for a game, v Japan in Rennes, one seat in between us. How does that even happen? How hard is it to place the vast majority together? Doing it by application rather than allowing people to pick their seats was totally unnecessary for most matches anyway. Of course, I'm just assuming the others are together because they're in sequence, but they could be either side of an aisle or whatever. I'm going with my 14 year old, so I'll be calling France tomorrow to see if we can get the seats changed. Oh well.

That's nearly a perfect point you make - it wasn't fairly quickly, there were years of rubbish with only Julie Fleeting any good, then there were years of agonising play-off defeats, before the breakthrough came three years ago. You could see women's football in Scotland slowly and steadily improving over the course of many years, especially with the dedication and professionalism at Glasgow City (how many men's part-time teams train four nights a week?). They gradually developed better young players, who headed off to the USA, Sweden and England where they improved with full-time football while another crop developed beneath them. Now we have a third generation coming through who can mix it with most of them. Boy's football on the other hand... eech. I've been lamenting that for 20 years. The set-up is appalling, the focus is all on the wrong things and there are only small and isolated signs of improvement. We value running about more than technique. The reason I'm so defeatist is because I've been watching age-grade football. FWIW, I think there's a big danger of other countries passing us in the women's game in the next couple of decades too. The standard is improving everywhere in Europe and UEFA are making a big push now. Attendances are shooting up in lots of places, many more girls are playing and more clubs are investing in coaching and facilities. Argentina, well below us in the world rankings, is launching a full-time league this year. We're still stuck with crowds of 200-300, part-time football and the more the SFA gets involved, the worse it is likely to get.

I could have sworn I saw them both playing in the knock-out stages of the last European Championship, and saw Iceland top their qualifying group for the World Cup and then keep the world's best player quiet in a draw at the finals. Must have been someone else then.