Scotland squad euro 2020

[Gordopolis]

I think there's a sliding scale ranging from "getting them in early" to "waiting till they're 27".

There are examples of both from Scotland, but it certainly feels to me like we're closer than many other countries to the latter end of that scale.

Obviously how it "feels" to me isn't empirical evidence, but as a loose example, when Robertson earned his first cap aged 19, there was a lot of fanfare and back-slapping about it. I'm not sure why. As I see it, capping a teenager shouldn't be a freak occurrence. In fact, if you're not bringing through a player or two of that age every few years then you're system isn't functioning properly.

[RobbieD]

Does anyone know how many teenagers we’ve actually capped post Berti Vogts?

[Gordopolis]

Does anyone know how many teenagers we’ve actually capped post Berti Vogts?

Tierney
Robertson
Wilson
Hanley
Gilmour
Burke
Forrest
Saunders

Think that's it over the 17 years

[HalfCutNinja]

1 hour ago, Dunning1874 said:

Well no, the worst outcome you end up with is that you've picked players due to their youth on the basis of giving them experience, however they actually turn out to be considerably worse than your best players and you have poorer results as a consequence, while young players suffer for being thrown in to get pumped if they aren't good enough yet.

There absolutely have been examples of managers not trusting players due to their youth and it's right that that's criticised when it happens, for example Strachan picking Whittaker, Mulgrew and even Craig Forsyth ahead of Robertson when it was already apparent to anyone with a clue that Robertson was comfortably the best left back available to us, even if no one was talking about him becoming world class then. It was appalling management and there was no explanation for it other than Robertson's age. He was clearly good enough and should have been starting every game. That genuinely should have cost Strachan his job, as I sincerely believe we'd have made the playoffs in those 2016 qualifiers without those choices.

I don't think anyone's saying that there's no problem here, but it's not as simple as saying 'start capping players at 18' then seeing them all magically turn into world class players by virtue of having 15 more caps than if they'd first been capped at 21. As a general rule nations will cap players at a younger age if they've already demonstrated that they're good enough at that younger age, hence Eden Hazard being capped at 17 because he had already made himself an established first team footballer at a good level at 17, standing out as an excellent player in Ligue 1.

On the other hand, chucking Stephen O'Donnell into the Scotland squad when he was 19 wouldn't have been a good idea, because he was getting his first experience of first team football in a side finishing 6th in the Scottish second tier and showing no indication he'd become a Scotland player one day. Kevin Nisbet getting his first Scotland cap at 24 rather than 20 or 21 isn't a failure on the part of any Scotland managers, it's the entirely reasonable and natural consequence of Nisbet's career to date. Calling him up at 21 when he was embarrassing himself as one of the worst players in a Dumbarton team being relegated from the Championship would have been the most ridiculous decision a Scotland manager has ever made.

Excellent international players have so many caps having started so young because they'd already made it obvious how good they were at a young age, not the other way round: they didn't become good just because they were capped young to give it a try. Hazard, Kylian Mbappe, Aaron Ramsey - they were obviously already among the best players available to their country as teenagers. Stephen O'Donnell and Callum McGregor were not.

There's a risk of baby out with the bathwater here. You can ask if there's a deeper issue with youth development in Scotland that the wrong players are being identified in age grade footballers or if there's a reason some players are relatively late developers, but the solution is not to say that we should just launch everyone who's highly rated at 18 in for a cap and see if they sink or swim. If you get a genuine once in a generation talent like Gilmour that's a different discussion, but we have moved quickly with him - he's been capped at 19 having played only 22 first team games. He's not established as a first team footballer yet but because he looks so good, he's in the squad for a tournament. Same with positions where we're weaker, where Patterson has been given a call up despite having g so little experience as the only alternative was a known mediocrity like Palmer anyway.

We had this issue in 2018 qualifying, when fingers were being pointed at Berra and Mulgrew as being too old. We should have had a younger centre back partnership, a bit of succession planning for the future, not old duds like them and others who'd failed before like Russell Martin and, er, Grant Hanley, who was all of 26 years old at the time. It's almost as if players aren't given slack if they're called up as teenagers and are pish at first due to not being ready!

It was all very well to say that we should have phased Berra and Mulgrew out sooner with hindsight, but look at the younger centre backs who've been capped since that campaign. When it started Jack Hendry was dossing about in England's League One on loan having failing to get a game for his relegation battling Championship club. John Souttar was looking the inferior player beside Berra at club level. The highest level David Bates had played was the Scottish Championship, where he failed to break into the Raith team and had loan spells with East Stirling and Brechin. Scott McKenna couldn't get a game for Ayr United.

So if you said then that we need to throw these older guys like Berra and Mulgrew in the bin to ensure our best young talent gets some experience now so they aren't being capped too late, you want our highest rated young centre backs at the time thrown straight in to stand them in good stead to be solid international centre backs for years to come. You look to the centre backs getting the most games for the under 21s at the time, and you have Jordan McGhee, Zak Jules and Joe Chalmers.

Would anyone be better off if we'd given Jordan McGhee two or three caps as a 19 year old? Would it have turned McGhee into a credible international centre back, rather than the average Championship centre back/good Championship midfielder he's become? Would Scotland have had better results by putting an obviously inferior player in the side?

No, obviously not. You pick your best players. Where obviously talented youngsters are being ignored due to their age in the way Robertson was even after getting his first cap then that should be called out and criticised, but I think people massively overstate how often this happens.

Reality disagrees with you. It happens all the time, far far far too much for far too long.

Take this squad right now. If we were Holland, or even Wales, Josh Doig is in the squad instead of Taylor.

Doig played 36 games for the the team that finished an easy third in the league, Taylor managed a grand total of 12 games for Celtic. 

Doig is the better player. Not in the future, right now. If you're picking a team to play for your life tomorrow afternoon and can have one or the other its Doig, cause he's the better player. Right now.

So why is he not in the squad when a clearly inferior player who plays the same position is?

Same with Gilmour. If not for injuries he's not in the squad. He won't be a first choice in the tournament and clearly inferior players like McGregor will feature heavily.

O'Donnell will be first choice for the tournament and probably get roasted. Patterson is clearly the better player. Right now, not in three years, not potentially. He's a better footballer today than O'Donnell is. So throw him in. Let O'Donnell be his back-up, if he gets an injury or tires after 75 minutes let O'Donnell fill in for him not the other way round.

This is what other countries do. Holland pick players after three games of senior football if they're good enough they're in. Their age and experience is irrelevant, only their quality. Look at the Wales squad, loaded with guys who've hardly kicked a ball of senior football.

When Danny Wilson was getting picked that's cause he was the best option available, he didn't cost us anything and him and us did not suffer from picking him young, His career stalled as he made a bad move. 

Both Doig and Hickey are better players than Taylor right now. Hickey if fit would have been overlooked, Doig has been, for a player who is clearly inferior and has played less football this season than both of them. So it does happen all the time and isn't overstated.  Its a problem with the mindset in Scottish football.

 

[craigkillie]

It's a never ending cycle though, isn't it? Taylor gets capped at the age of 21 after playing basically every game for a team that finished 3rd in the league, but then within two years he's not good enough and we need to replace him with another young player who has played every game for a team that finished 3rd in the league. Then if Doig goes to Rangers or whatever and can't get a regular game do we suddenly go with Jack McKenzie because he's had a season at Aberdeen? Then you're still ending up with guys not getting enough caps.

[HuttonDressedAsLahm]

2 hours ago, Dunning1874 said:

Well no, the worst outcome you end up with is that you've picked players due to their youth on the basis of giving them experience, however they actually turn out to be considerably worse than your best players and you have poorer results as a consequence, while young players suffer for being thrown in to get pumped if they aren't good enough yet.

There absolutely have been examples of managers not trusting players due to their youth and it's right that that's criticised when it happens, for example Strachan picking Whittaker, Mulgrew and even Craig Forsyth ahead of Robertson when it was already apparent to anyone with a clue that Robertson was comfortably the best left back available to us, even if no one was talking about him becoming world class then. It was appalling management and there was no explanation for it other than Robertson's age. He was clearly good enough and should have been starting every game. That genuinely should have cost Strachan his job, as I sincerely believe we'd have made the playoffs in those 2016 qualifiers without those choices.

I don't think anyone's saying that there's no problem here, but it's not as simple as saying 'start capping players at 18' then seeing them all magically turn into world class players by virtue of having 15 more caps than if they'd first been capped at 21. As a general rule nations will cap players at a younger age if they've already demonstrated that they're good enough at that younger age, hence Eden Hazard being capped at 17 because he had already made himself an established first team footballer at a good level at 17, standing out as an excellent player in Ligue 1.

On the other hand, chucking Stephen O'Donnell into the Scotland squad when he was 19 wouldn't have been a good idea, because he was getting his first experience of first team football in a side finishing 6th in the Scottish second tier and showing no indication he'd become a Scotland player one day. Kevin Nisbet getting his first Scotland cap at 24 rather than 20 or 21 isn't a failure on the part of any Scotland managers, it's the entirely reasonable and natural consequence of Nisbet's career to date. Calling him up at 21 when he was embarrassing himself as one of the worst players in a Dumbarton team being relegated from the Championship would have been the most ridiculous decision a Scotland manager has ever made.

Excellent international players have so many caps having started so young because they'd already made it obvious how good they were at a young age, not the other way round: they didn't become good just because they were capped young to give it a try. Hazard, Kylian Mbappe, Aaron Ramsey - they were obviously already among the best players available to their country as teenagers. Stephen O'Donnell and Callum McGregor were not.

There's a risk of baby out with the bathwater here. You can ask if there's a deeper issue with youth development in Scotland that the wrong players are being identified in age grade footballers or if there's a reason some players are relatively late developers, but the solution is not to say that we should just launch everyone who's highly rated at 18 in for a cap and see if they sink or swim. If you get a genuine once in a generation talent like Gilmour that's a different discussion, but we have moved quickly with him - he's been capped at 19 having played only 22 first team games. He's not established as a first team footballer yet but because he looks so good, he's in the squad for a tournament. Same with positions where we're weaker, where Patterson has been given a call up despite having g so little experience as the only alternative was a known mediocrity like Palmer anyway.

We had this issue in 2018 qualifying, when fingers were being pointed at Berra and Mulgrew as being too old. We should have had a younger centre back partnership, a bit of succession planning for the future, not old duds like them and others who'd failed before like Russell Martin and, er, Grant Hanley, who was all of 26 years old at the time. It's almost as if players aren't given slack if they're called up as teenagers and are pish at first due to not being ready!

It was all very well to say that we should have phased Berra and Mulgrew out sooner with hindsight, but look at the younger centre backs who've been capped since that campaign. When it started Jack Hendry was dossing about in England's League One on loan having failing to get a game for his relegation battling Championship club. John Souttar was looking the inferior player beside Berra at club level. The highest level David Bates had played was the Scottish Championship, where he failed to break into the Raith team and had loan spells with East Stirling and Brechin. Scott McKenna couldn't get a game for Ayr United.

So if you said then that we need to throw these older guys like Berra and Mulgrew in the bin to ensure our best young talent gets some experience now so they aren't being capped too late, you want our highest rated young centre backs at the time thrown straight in to stand them in good stead to be solid international centre backs for years to come. You look to the centre backs getting the most games for the under 21s at the time, and you have Jordan McGhee, Zak Jules and Joe Chalmers.

Would anyone be better off if we'd given Jordan McGhee two or three caps as a 19 year old? Would it have turned McGhee into a credible international centre back, rather than the average Championship centre back/good Championship midfielder he's become? Would Scotland have had better results by putting an obviously inferior player in the side?

No, obviously not. You pick your best players. Where obviously talented youngsters are being ignored due to their age in the way Robertson was even after getting his first cap then that should be called out and criticised, but I think people massively overstate how often this happens.

So what you’re saying is that this is almost a uniquely Scottish problem, and we can only identify decent players in their mid 20s and our 17-22-year-old players are that much poorer (relative to their senior peers), than other countries in Europe?

I’m emphasising for effect, but we certainly appear to have a serious lack of foresight, and continuously fail to succession plan. Also, cherry picking various players who weren’t of international standard at the age of 19, or 21, does not disprove the point.  The fact that Kevin Nisbet is getting called up at 24 after a decent season at Hibs is conversely to be commended.  After all, how many goals did Griffiths needs to score before he got close to a starting XI?

I’ve looked at each of the other home nations over the last decade, and by a distance, they cap players younger and develop a core team that sees them through for a decade.  They have all qualified for tournaments without the use of a NL safety net, so something they have been doing works.  And it certainly has worked for the other small and successful European nations.

The context at the moment is that we may actually be turning this corner, so the point may (certainly hopefully) be a moot one.  But it is undoubtedly been a problem for many many years, continuing to throw caps around at very average players, whilst continuously ignoring, or failing to give an opportunity to players who were clearly of a decent standard, with the potential to make a big impact.

Edited June 4, 2021 by HuttonDressedAsLahm

[HalfCutNinja]

26 minutes ago, craigkillie said:

It's a never ending cycle though, isn't it? Taylor gets capped at the age of 21 after playing basically every game for a team that finished 3rd in the league, but then within two years he's not good enough and we need to replace him with another young player who has played every game for a team that finished 3rd in the league. Then if Doig goes to Rangers or whatever and can't get a regular game do we suddenly go with Jack McKenzie because he's had a season at Aberdeen? Then you're still ending up with guys not getting enough caps.

Of course it is, someone better comes along you pick them. That's the nature of it.

What will happen here, as has happened a hundred times before, Taylor will get 15 or 20 or 25 caps, will never really do particularly well, never really be good enough, always a bit substandard. Yet he will cause Hickey and Doig to wait a couple of years longer than they should, maybe three, for their first cap. And they will get 5 or 10 or 15 fewer than they would have, and take that bit longer to settle and adjust to international football.

And repeat.

Its not about having one good season at Aberdeen or Kilmarnock either its about just being better. Hickey and Doig clearly have got it, and are going to be international players for a decade plus. Taylor is a wee stop gap. What's the point in that?

[craigkillie]

Taylor continuing to be underrated is the issue here though. He's a very talented young player who will go on to have a great career - if he was a Hibs player he would be playing ahead of Doig. Hickey is a different story, he's clearly a proper talent, but Doig hasn't shown anything yet that Taylor hasn't.

[MarkoRaj]

Ah yes, this is much more like it

[HalfCutNinja]

1 hour ago, craigkillie said:

Taylor continuing to be underrated is the issue here though. He's a very talented young player who will go on to have a great career - if he was a Hibs player he would be playing ahead of Doig. Hickey is a different story, he's clearly a proper talent, but Doig hasn't shown anything yet that Taylor hasn't.

Yeah he has, that's why clubs like Arsenal and AC Milan are sniffing about him willing to pay several million and they aren't Taylor who is struggling to get a game at Celtic.  I don't think Taylor is underrated. He's very average, not quite Celtic standard and will probably end up at Aberdeen or something, whereas Hickey and Doig will play at the highest level.

[gannonball]

Taylor absolutely makes more sense compared to Doig for the Euros. The defence is still quite questionable and it would make sense to have somebody more defensively minded and experienced should Robertson be injured and Tierney kept in the centre or also injured.

[HalfCutNinja]

1 hour ago, gannonball said:

Taylor absolutely makes more sense compared to Doig for the Euros. The defence is still quite questionable and it would make sense to have somebody more defensively minded and experienced should Robertson be injured and Tierney kept in the centre or also injured.

Taylor isn't very defence minded and is small and shite. He's like a converted winger. Doig is a unit and quality.

[DiegoDiego]

Wales could cap dozens of teenagers because their squad was pot five garbage at the time.

[ewan14]

3 hours ago, gannonball said:

Taylor absolutely makes more sense compared to Doig for the Euros. The defence is still quite questionable and it would make sense to have somebody more defensively minded and experienced should Robertson be injured and Tierney kept in the centre or also injured.

Can Taylor defend the back post ?

If so he is in !

Edited June 5, 2021 by ewan14

[ewan14]

2 hours ago, HalfCutNinja said:

Taylor isn't very defence minded and is small and shite. He's like a converted winger. Doig is a unit and quality.

See post above

[HalfCutNinja]

7 minutes ago, ewan14 said:

Can Taylor defend the back post ?

If so he is in !

Well considering he's 7 inches shorter than Doig I'd say that's a no.

[TheScarf]

1 hour ago, DiegoDiego said:

Wales could cap dozens of teenagers because their squad was pot five garbage at the time.

Yeah, Wales is a bad example to use. They were losing to the likes of Armenia regularly before Bale showed up.

[HalfCutNinja]

2 hours ago, DiegoDiego said:

Wales could cap dozens of teenagers because their squad was pot five garbage at the time.

Yet now have a much better recent record than us and continue to do so. 

[DiegoDiego]

Yet now have a much better recent record than us and continue to do so. 

The point is the asymmetric risk-reward which isn't the case with the Scotland of today.

[HalfCutNinja]

19 minutes ago, DiegoDiego said:

35 minutes ago, HalfCutNinja said:

Yet now have a much better recent record than us and continue to do so. 

The point is the asymmetric risk-reward which isn't the case with the Scotland of today.

No it isn't. That's your perception that there's risk. There's risk in starting a guy who plays for Motherwell againt Jack Grealish. There's a reason he plays for Motherwell - cause he's shite. That's risk.

Playing McGregor instead of one of the best young midfielders in Europe - that's risk. Playing a guy who played 12 games for the worst Celtic side in 20 years this season and probably won't even last there more than one more year where he'll hardly play is risk.

Holding back players as they are young to play inferior players as they aren't young is risk.