Will Scotland ever be good again?

[Peppino Impastato]

3 hours ago, pandarilla said:

So are you saying Scotland doesn't have enough poverty?
 

Did I say that?  You asked the reason why, that's one of the main ones.

[Peppino Impastato]

3 hours ago, forameus said:

Ah, so you're one of the morons that just wails "it cannae git any worse min!!!"!"!" then?  Figures.  

We haven't qualified for 20 years, which is obviously not good.  But to throw all the toys out and suggest that that is as bad as it can get is short-sighted at best, and downright moronic at slighty-less-best.  It's not even as if we haven't seen it before - in fairly recent years we've been much, much worse.  Weren't we the first team to be eliminated from a qualifying campaign not so long ago?  As in, earlier than some of the super-diddies?  And that's not even as bad as it could get.

That's where the huge risk comes in.  We could do a Wales and throw 11 young players together and pretend like results don't matter, but that's not really realistic is it?  They could end up qualifying for the first time in 2 decades, or, more likely, they end up getting cuffed because they're - quel surprise - not ready.  Tanking our seedings and rankings and making sure that qualifying campaigns are even harder next time around.

If we were finishing dead last in our group every campaign, then I'd be far, far more inclined to agree to try something more radical.  I don't think it's going to take anything like that to get two more points against Lithuania/Georgia.

Genius!  Just make everyone poor and we'll win the World Cup!

Shut up you utter fanny.  For Scotland not qualifying for twenty years is as bad as it gets.  This is rock bottom.

[pandarilla]

Did I say that?  You asked the reason why, that's one of the main ones.

So, just to be clear.

Scotland not having enough poverty is one of the main reasons we're underperforming?

[Peppino Impastato]

Just now, pandarilla said:

So, just to be clear.

Scotland not having enough poverty is one of the main reasons we're underperforming?

Of course.  I can't be bothered explaining cause you're a fanny but yes.  

[forameus]

1 minute ago, pandarilla said:

So, just to be clear.

Scotland not having enough poverty is one of the main reasons we're underperforming?

 

Just now, Peppino Impastato said:

Of course.  I can't be bothered explaining cause you're a fanny but yes.  

What a fucking zoomer.

[Peppino Impastato]

People asked what the difference between Scotland and Croatia is, well there's two main ones.  Poverty and climate.  Poverty breeds hungry players with proper work ethic who want to succeed.  Gives them an edge.  Scottish players don't have that.

[forameus]

19% of Scottish people considered to be living in poverty.

EDIT: Should also say that a (very) quick google had Croatia at 20.5% (in 2012 granted), so not too much improvement needed to knock that extra 1.5% into poverty so we can lead Pep's batshit mental revolution.

Edited July 19, 2018 by forameus

[DA Baracus]

Folk STILL responding the cretin that is Peppino is mental. 

[TheScarf]

It's Stuart Dickson/Law Stud IMO.

[Dunning1874]

On 18/07/2018 at 15:00, 54_and_counting said:

Yes and funnily enough both have grown in the team and are better players for it, 

However, picking older players that have failed time and time again to qualify for tournaments doesnt help matters when they all get too old and scotland need to bring in untested players, these guys usually are mid twenties with no caps and no international experience, and then fans wonder why they dont qualify for anything

Hell check the full belgian team, their back 3 that lost to france in the semi have 273 caps between then, not one of them is older than 32

The point im trying to make is that Scotland dont have a successful team, so why not pick the 6 or 7 best guys who have the best potential and start playing them now, guys like gauld (aye he's not playing much club football but the level of training he's had is probably miles better than back here, least that's what is used in defense of him in his thread) 

Build something from scratch, simply replacing one old retiree with a 29yo who's never been capped before is like putting a plaster over a stab wound

This again?

Every single time this topic comes up you make this point, every single time the responses come out and you take no account of them when you're trotting it out again a few months down the road.

You say we should bin older players and just put the best youngsters in their place, because players who've failed so many times are obviously never going to be a success. Northern Ireland could have adopted that logic; after all, Gareth McAuley and Steve Davis had won the bulk of their caps when Northern Ireland were perennial bottom two pot minnows who never even made a challenge for qualification. However, McAuley and Davis are quite obviously two of their best players, so they didn't, and with then 36 year old McAuley in their defence, who'd been part of four failed qualifying campaigns prior to that one, they made it to the European Championship, then to the playoffs for the World Cup.

If you say 'bin players after X number of failed campaigns, they're clearly never going to make it', you're chucking players who have learned from those campaigns, and when you're adopting that logic along with saying we need to pick more youngsters so they have experience you've put yourself in a contradictory argument. No doubt you're going to argue that this somehow proves your point because it's the wealth of experience McAuley and Davis had that took them to the next level proving we need to pick players young, but by the time those players hit their late 20s having learned from their international experience and developed as players, you're going to say we need to drop them for a new batch again because they've failed so many times, just like you did with Scott Brown. You're cutting your nose off to spite your face if they're still your best players.

You should pick your best players at all times regardless of age, and while that absolutely applies to teenagers and we should question it strongly when those players are left out, it also applies to older players, Which brings us nicely to the next part of the argument.

Eden Hazard, Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey, Kevin De Bruyne, Kylian Mbappe and I'm sure many more players all got their first caps as teenagers and established themselves as first choices for their country in their early 20s at the latest, yes. They did that because they were already the best players their countries had available in their positions. Belgium didn't decide they had to pick players under 25 and bomb everyone older out to develop good players, it was the other way round. They picked so many youngsters because they had developed so many good young players that they were already better than their established internationals when they were 18/19.

They didn't just chuck them in and hope for the best, that would be putting the cart before the horse. The likes of Hazard & De Bruyne proved themselves to be the best players with their performances and got picked on merit as a result - that's why Eden Hazard has 92 caps but Thorgan Hazard only has 13 while Fellaini and Witsel continue to be picked. If they were adopting your logic they'd have bombed out Witsel already for Youri Tielemans even though Tielemans isn't as good yet.

There are cases where promising young Scottish players aren't picked ahead of obviously inferior players because they're too young, and this is appalling management which should see the managers responsible hounded. Strachan refusing to trust Andy Robertson in picking Steven Whittaker, Charlie Mulgrew and Craig Forsyth ahead of him was an absolute embarrassment which should have cost him his job - it's no coincidence that the only game of the six v the four qualification rivals we won or kept a clean sheet in was the one with Robertson on the pitch - but these cases are few and far between.

We'd all have loved Ryan Gauld to be ready to be thrown in to the national team, but the fact is he hasn't done anything at club level to justify being picked ahead of older players, because they're better than him at the moment. People complained about Mulgrew and Berra being picked in the last campaign... where were the defenders ready to take their place? John Souttar was looking clearly the lesser player playing alongside Berra, Jack Hendry had shown no signs of developing into an international footballer floating around loan spells in English League One, Scott McKenna had played less than 20 senior games and couldn't get a game for Ayr United, David Bates had never played a in the top flight and had less than 30 senior games the majority of which were in League Two, Ross McCrorie had never played in the top flight and couldn't get a game for Dumbarton, the most regular centre back for the under 21s was Jordan McGhee, who couldn't get a game for Hearts and found himself finishing 8th in the Championship with Falkirk in the season that campaign ended.

Now that some of those youngsters have shown their potential, they are being picked for Scotland. However, if we'd adopted your logic we'd have bombed the older players out in favour of the flavour of the month in the under-21s, and we'd have had Jordan McGhee starting ahead of Christophe Berra. Other luminaries featuring in defence for the under-21s around this time included Zak Jules, Joe Chalmers and Jamie McCart. That would have made Scotland poorer defensively, made the results worse, tanked our seeding further making it more difficult to qualify whenever good players capable of getting results do come along, and done nothing to make Jordan McGhee a more credible option for international football.

You may say you'd accept the short term pain of shite results for the chance to miraculously turn these players into successful internationals on account of hitting a magic total of caps at a young age, but I say that's quite evidently bullshit. Grant Hanley got his first cap when he was 19. Now every time he's called up there are howls of derision on account of him being pish in his previous appearances and the fact he's been around for too many failures. We need to give younger centre backs a chance ahead of that diddy. He's 26.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Looking forward to living in a Mad Max style wasteland when Peppy comes to power so we can qualify for a World Cup

[Jason King]

4 hours ago, forameus said:

Yet it doesn't change the fact that we were one slightly-less-shite result away from getting the playoffs.  Doesn't really necessitate the scorched Earth approach does it?  I don't think we necessarily need to torch the vast majority of our squad just to gain at least two more points.  Not being such unimaginative shitebags against Lithuania would have done that.

But we didn't get one slightly less shite result - the players and management we have took us to our appropriate position in the group. I'm sure if you analysed the full 90 minutes of each game you could find mistakes that if they hadn't been made would have changed the game but errors happened and Scotland ended up where they deserved to be.

[Jason King]

3 hours ago, Peppino Impastato said:

Shut up you utter fanny.  For Scotland not qualifying for twenty years is as bad as it gets.  This is rock bottom.

Rock bottom would be the entire squad dying in a plane crash, its not as if that actually happened to anyone like say Zambia who became African champions within 20 years of losing their best players

[Peppino Impastato]

34 minutes ago, Jason King said:

Rock bottom would be the entire squad dying in a plane crash, its not as if that actually happened to anyone like say Zambia who became African champions within 20 years of losing their best players

Shut up

[Peppino Impastato]

4 hours ago, forameus said:

19% of Scottish people considered to be living in poverty.

EDIT: Should also say that a (very) quick google had Croatia at 20.5% (in 2012 granted), so not too much improvement needed to knock that extra 1.5% into poverty so we can lead Pep's batshit mental revolution.

Poverty is very different in Croatia to Scotland.  The GDP per capita here is double there.

[GordonS]

4 hours ago, forameus said:

19% of Scottish people considered to be living in poverty.

 

EDIT: Should also say that a (very) quick google had Croatia at 20.5% (in 2012 granted), so not too much improvement needed to knock that extra 1.5% into poverty so we can lead Pep's batshit mental revolution.

Pretty sure that's relative poverty - the proportion living under x% of the median income for that country. I'm sure Croatian poverty is worse than Scottish poverty, especially the way their economy has gone in the past decade.

[GordonS]

Has anyone actually read Project Brave? I've spent the past 20 minutes hunting for it online. Any advice?

It's disconcerting that I could find the Belgian FA's strategy, but not the SFA's. 

[pandarilla]

Has anyone actually read Project Brave? I've spent the past 20 minutes hunting for it online. Any advice?
It's disconcerting that I could find the Belgian FA's strategy, but not the SFA's. 

Did pep write it?

[skippy2015]

19% of Scottish people considered to be living in poverty.

EDIT: Should also say that a (very) quick google had Croatia at 20.5% (in 2012 granted), so not too much improvement needed to knock that extra 1.5% into poverty so we can lead Pep's batshit mental revolution.

19 per cent of Scotland don’t live in poverty. The Scottish definition of poverty is having only freeview, 1 TV, 1 car and Samsung J3 as we tend to compare how rich or poor we are with neighbours and those around us not our wealth on a global basis.

Looking at a worldwide perspective a very small percentage of the Scottish population live in actual poverty. majority of scotland is actually in the top 10 percent richest people on the planet.

Why we have failed last 20 years is a complex question with so many different factors. You could look at the SFA over the last 20 years and some of their poor decision making, the coaching of grass roots players, the weather, our general health as a nation, the quality of our coaches and the reasons many good coaches have left the game, bad luck, the fact other nations have improved and there’s more competition now, less qualifying positions, the facilities we have compared to Scandinavian countries, how we deal with big games mentally are we a nation of bottlers!!!

[forameus]

9 hours ago, skippy2015 said:

19 per cent of Scotland don’t live in poverty. The Scottish definition of poverty is having only freeview, 1 TV, 1 car and Samsung J3 as we tend to compare how rich or poor we are with neighbours and those around us not our wealth on a global basis.

Looking at a worldwide perspective a very small percentage of the Scottish population live in actual poverty. majority of scotland is actually in the top 10 percent richest people on the planet.

Why we have failed last 20 years is a complex question with so many different factors. You could look at the SFA over the last 20 years and some of their poor decision making, the coaching of grass roots players, the weather, our general health as a nation, the quality of our coaches and the reasons many good coaches have left the game, bad luck, the fact other nations have improved and there’s more competition now, less qualifying positions, the facilities we have compared to Scandinavian countries, how we deal with big games mentally are we a nation of bottlers!!!

It wasn't exactly a serious reply, given it was replying to an absolutely ridiculous point.  

You're right about the last bit though - there is no easy answer.  If there was, I'd imagine even the SFA could manage it.  But wooly, non-definitive answers don't really please many.  It's got to be one thing in particular.  If only it were that simple.