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Worst Scotland international players


AllySloan

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While you can throw together some horrendous XIs consisting of one cap wonders such as Warren Cummings, I find threads like this more fun if you set a minimum number of caps and see how bad an XI you can construct of players who were regulars for at least one campaign or floated around squads for years.

Restricting myself to players who've had at least 10 caps:

Rab Douglas

Steven Caldwell - Gordon Greer - Lee Wilkie

Callum Paterson ---‐---------------------- Paul Devlin

Scott Severin - Gary Holt - Don Cowie

Oli McBurnie - Kevin Kyle

An entirely sane 3-5-2 with Paterson and Devlin as wing backs here. Maybe harsh on Paterson since that's not his position, but he's been shoehorned in at right back often enough, being appalling every time, to justify being included instead of Maurice Ross.

Greer, Holt, Severin and Cowie weren't actually terrible, they were just around squads as cover for years and were nowhere near as good as other regulars over the period.  Could toss a coin between those central midfielders and Gavin Rae really, all much of a just a bit out of their depth muchness. At a massive stretch you could maybe argue the case for players like Bannan, Quashie or Ritchie who had some runs of consistently diabolical performances instead, but they all had more ability and some good games to go with their bad ones.

The only goalkeepers with enough caps to be considered along with Douglas that I can remember are Leighton, Goram, Sullivan, McGregor, Gordon and Marshall, so Douglas is just the weakest among a good standard of player.

The rest of them though, absolute nightmare fuel.

Edited by Dunning1874
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21 minutes ago, Dunning1874 said:

While you can throw together some horrendous XIs consisting of one cap wonders such as Warren Cummings, I find threads like this more fun if you set a minimum number of caps and see how bad an XI you can construct of players who were regulars for at least one campaign or floated around squads for years.

Restricting myself to players who've had at least 10 caps:

Rab Douglas

Steven Caldwell - Gordon Greer - Lee Wilkie

Callum Paterson ---‐---------------------- Paul Devlin

Scott Severin - Gary Holt - Don Cowie

Oli McBurnie - Kevin Kyle

An entirely sane 3-5-2 with Paterson and Devlin as wing backs here. Maybe harsh on Paterson since that's not his position, but he's been shoehorned in at right back often enough, being appalling every time, to justify being included instead of Maurice Ross.

Greer, Holt, Severin and Cowie weren't actually terrible, they were just around squads as cover for years and were nowhere near as good as other regulars over the period.  Could toss a coin between those central midfielders and Gavin Rae really, all much of a just a bit out of their depth muchness. At a massive stretch you could maybe argue the case for players like Bannan, Quashie or Ritchie who had some runs of consistently diabolical performances instead, but they all had more ability and some good games to go with their bad ones.

The only goalkeepers with enough caps to be considered along with Douglas that I can remember are Leighton, Goram, Sullivan, McGregor, Gordon and Marshall, so Douglas is just the weakest among a good standard of player.

The rest of them though, absolute nightmare fuel.

Honking team Douglas was better than Archer

McBurnie is probably better than Kevin Kyle or Scott Dobie people would have Chris Iwelumo up there to but in England he hit a lot of gosls

Ian Black played for Scotland most of the others did well in England Don Cowie did well at Cardiff City 

Brian Kerr played for Scotland 

Edited by Tartan Tammy 1297
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25 minutes ago, Dunning1874 said:

While you can throw together some horrendous XIs consisting of one cap wonders such as Warren Cummings, I find threads like this more fun if you set a minimum number of caps and see how bad an XI you can construct of players who were regulars for at least one campaign or floated around squads for years.

Restricting myself to players who've had at least 10 caps:

Rab Douglas

Steven Caldwell - Gordon Greer - Lee Wilkie

Callum Paterson ---‐---------------------- Paul Devlin

Scott Severin - Gary Holt - Don Cowie

Oli McBurnie - Kevin Kyle

An entirely sane 3-5-2 with Paterson and Devlin as wing backs here. Maybe harsh on Paterson since that's not his position, but he's been shoehorned in at right back often enough, being appalling every time, to justify being included instead of Maurice Ross.

Greer, Holt, Severin and Cowie weren't actually terrible, they were just around squads as cover for years and were nowhere near as good as other regulars over the period.  Could toss a coin between those central midfielders and Gavin Rae really, all much of a just a bit out of their depth muchness. At a massive stretch you could maybe argue the case for players like Bannan, Quashie or Ritchie who had some runs of consistently diabolical performances instead, but they all had more ability and some good games to go with their bad ones.

The only goalkeepers with enough caps to be considered along with Douglas that I can remember are Leighton, Goram, Sullivan, McGregor, Gordon and Marshall, so Douglas is just the weakest among a good standard of player.

The rest of them though, absolute nightmare fuel.

can't believe Severin got more than 10 caps. Had to look it up - 15 !!! But think perhaps Gavin Rae would edge out Cowie and the evergreen Gary Teale would give Devlin good competition. ideally you would like to see two players competing for every position to get the best out of each of them.....

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1 minute ago, Tartan Tammy 1297 said:

Kirk Broadfoot 

Bob Malcolm 

Usually in these type of things to  even though Broadfoot got winner against Iceland 

I'd be surprised to see Bob Malcolm mentioned, considering that he wasn't capped.

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1 hour ago, Dunning1874 said:

While you can throw together some horrendous XIs consisting of one cap wonders such as Warren Cummings, I find threads like this more fun if you set a minimum number of caps and see how bad an XI you can construct of players who were regulars for at least one campaign or floated around squads for years.

Restricting myself to players who've had at least 10 caps:

Rab Douglas

Steven Caldwell - Gordon Greer - Lee Wilkie

Callum Paterson ---‐---------------------- Paul Devlin

Scott Severin - Gary Holt - Don Cowie

Oli McBurnie - Kevin Kyle

An entirely sane 3-5-2 with Paterson and Devlin as wing backs here. Maybe harsh on Paterson since that's not his position, but he's been shoehorned in at right back often enough, being appalling every time, to justify being included instead of Maurice Ross.

Greer, Holt, Severin and Cowie weren't actually terrible, they were just around squads as cover for years and were nowhere near as good as other regulars over the period.  Could toss a coin between those central midfielders and Gavin Rae really, all much of a just a bit out of their depth muchness. At a massive stretch you could maybe argue the case for players like Bannan, Quashie or Ritchie who had some runs of consistently diabolical performances instead, but they all had more ability and some good games to go with their bad ones.

The only goalkeepers with enough caps to be considered along with Douglas that I can remember are Leighton, Goram, Sullivan, McGregor, Gordon and Marshall, so Douglas is just the weakest among a good standard of player.

The rest of them though, absolute nightmare fuel.

 

Greer had a very good Scotland career - 11 caps, and our only defeat was in his very last one, a 3-0 defeat to France in a friendly.

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33 minutes ago, Tartan Tammy 1297 said:

Kirk Broadfoot 

Bob Malcolm 

Usually in these type of things to  even though Broadfoot got winner against Iceland 

doesn't make you an international player though. In saying that even if you have had one cap and not a sniff of another cap for the next 15 odd years of a journeyman footballing career, it won't stop commentators referring to said player as "the Scottish international". Occasionally pre-fixed by "former" but this will not be fully applied across the board until actual retirement from club football. 

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Grant Hanley in instead of Greer perhaps, might hit the >10cap threshold w/o a quick google to cheat? Never ever felt comfortable with Hanley in at CB.

edit: of the CB's with more than 10 caps that were awful he was one of the first names to come to mind tbh so im sticking to my guns either way, sue me

 

Another name springing to mind is Ross McCormack, can barely remember him in a Scotland shirt and I'm sure he ended up winning a few caps to meet >10 caps too. Sure he scored at least once but iirc he was a massive letdown.

Edited by Thistle_do_nicely
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12 minutes ago, Thistle_do_nicely said:

Another name springing to mind is Ross McCormack, can barely remember him in a Scotland shirt and I'm sure he ended up winning a few caps to meet >10 caps too. Sure he scored at least once but iirc he was a massive letdown.

McCormack had a boggling amount of money spent on him in terms of transfers.

I think he scored twice- Iceland and Australia.

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This should really only feature players from the Vogts era. I feel a bit "remember the 90's" Sellick da' about this but frankly, if you're nominating anyone capped after 2005 then you're either too young or too traumatised and have repressed the memory of the jobber parade that was Berti's "Reign of Error". 

I consider myself to be in the too traumatised bracket because, despite having gone to most of our games under him (including all but one of the friendlies....what the f**k is wrong with me!!!) I genuinely can't remember the finer details beyond it being a field of utter dross and James McFadden. 

Wilkie at least scored a goal, and Devlin had a decent game against Iceland, so I can't give it to him. Stephen Crainey looked like the archetypal competition winner though. Looked utterly lost at that level. I genuinely can't remember any of the English haddies who were "unearthed" (exhumed may have been a better word) by BV aside from their names. I'll probably need hypnotherapy to recall the contributions of Robbie Stockdale, Scott Dobie et al.

Anyone nominating Gordon Greer obviously  can't remember his tackle on Lewandowski over in Warsaw that broke RL's shinpad and had him hobbling off in the first half. Tremendous thuggery.

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I remember the Iceland game vividly.
There was a lot of expectation surrounding McCormack (was it his debut?) as he was on fire at Cardiff that season. He played well and scored a cracker. I hoped he was going to go on and become a star for us - another creative option in an era when we only really had McFadden - but he did feck all after that.

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24 minutes ago, Gordopolis said:

I remember the Iceland game vividly.
There was a lot of expectation surrounding McCormack (was it his debut?) as he was on fire at Cardiff that season. He played well and scored a cracker. I hoped he was going to go on and become a star for us - another creative option in an era when we only really had McFadden - but he did feck all after that.

It was Kenny Miller and Lee Wilkie who scored the goals at Hampden that day......so you can't remember it that vividly 🙃.

I don't remember McCormack playing for us at all. My psyche has obviously just built a wall around some of the more harrowing memories of that period. It's not the sunny reconstruction of the truly unwell. I don't, for instance, yearn for the inclusion of Stevies Crawford or Caldwell in the squad, and I still utterly loathe Ioan Ganea (disgusting thug of a man). Maybe I'll go on an ayahuasca retreat and I'll be visited by the hitherto hidden demonic presences of McCormack and the aforementioned Stockdale etc.

It's a useful touchstone though and helps me get a sense of perspective and gratitude when names like Mackail-Smith and Jamie Mackie crop up.

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