Donathan

Apparently his season looks to be over. All for a meaningless friendly in Austria.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostate_cancer 5 year survival rate 99%…. Think Louis will be staying out of our teams for a few years yet

Have they said what (east)ended her?

We are a “boring Slovenia type team”

I’ve just looked again and perhaps I’m giving Burley too much credit for the fact that we only missed out on second place on goal difference. Even if we had come second in that group, we’d have been the worst second placed team and missed the playoffs anyway, and the only reason that we finished level on points with Norway is because they drew with Iceland twice and drew in Macedonia whereas we managed to take 9 points from those two teams to Norway’s 6. Euro 2012 qualifying with Levein was also very poor though. Drawing in Lithuania is a very poor result however you slice it up (say on par with the defeat in Macedonia). I’m not convinced that the 4-6-0 formation in Prague is what caused us to lose that game, but either way, only taking a single point from our main rivals isn’t acceptable. Burley’s statistical record looks worse because he took charge of six friendlies which included no wins, two draws and four defeats. Levein’s friendly record was actually pretty good at seven wins, one draw and four defeats, however his full campaign was near identical to Burley’s and the 2014 campaign was a disaster (Strachan righted the ship and got us 4th, but Levein managed to have us all but eliminated from only a few qualifiers) It’s all semantics anyway. They’re clearly the worst two, IMO. Vogts was horrendous, but at least he largely managed to get us into the playoffs and set the scene for a more successful period.

It’s basically a home game for Iran. They’re right across the Persian gulf from one another, so the locals will probably be cheering for Iran. They could be the dark horses to get through this group.

Give Europe an extra 4 at the expense of 2 each from Africa and Asia/Oceania imo. 24 European slots would allow the qualifying to use the same format as the euros qualifying. Also I’d just keep Asia and Oceania separate and have 11 Asians, 11 Africans and 2 Oceanians for the banter

I know they are allowed a maximum of five places in the UCL. So 4th place in the league misses the UCL only if English clubs win both the UCL and the UEL but neither finishes in the top 4. My best guess is that in this case, 5th place would no longer get you a European spot. UCL: Top 4 + West Ham UEL: Leicester + Palace Conference: None

The USA would still coast through a joint Americas qualifying for a 64 team World Cup, they’d probably be looking at 14 places. The entire CONMEBOL region could qualify and the USA would still likely come in the top 4 of the North American sides. And I’d expect them to finish above diddies like Bolivia and Venezuela.

What are you ranking them on? Stats or your overall feel for how good/horrendous they were? Competitive record mainly. Clarke qualified, Smith/McLeish1 got us very close in an incredibly tough group. Brown got us pretty close in a tough group. Strachan's result in Georgia let him down. McLeish2 was horrendous but at least won a UNL group to get us the playoff that we ultimately qualified from. Vogts and Burley were nearly men. Vogts was drubbed in a playoff and Burley missed the playoffs on goal difference. Levein was the worst of the bunch. In his campaign, we were the very first team in Europe to be eliminated from qualifying.

If we end up with a 64 team world cup then the South American qualifiers will become even more laughable than that. They're going to have 6.5 slots in a 48 team tournament. So, in a 64 team effort you'd be looking at 8 or 9 qualifiers from the 10 countries in CONMEBOL. A 2-year long, 18 game round robin to eliminate 1 or 2 teams. If that happens they'll probably rebrand it as a South American version of the nations league and attach some prestige to actually topping the qualifiers, with the qualifying itself just being part of the puzzle.

Yeah any further cancellations should be treated with a dim view. They’ve got two whole months to figure out how to get a squad ready, and if Dynamo Kyiv are allowed to leave the country to play friendlies then the national team definitely will.

As much as Rennie doesn’t deserve to be our manager based on his record, I don’t think we should bother spending money to get someone else in for the next 4 games. We aren’t going to make the promotion playoffs and I don’t see any danger of Dumbarton picking up enough points to put us in relegation playoff danger. Just punt the rest of this season and finish 7th/8th then blow it up and start again in the summer. Allan Johnston is a standout candidate for me given his track record in this league.

The 2008 group had 7 teams so there were 3 minnows to beat. Technically we did take 12/12 against the bottom two, but really we should be beating Georgia as well. Clarke has a 100% record in qualifiers against pot 5/6 teams. There were some near misses though. We needed very late winners to get 3 points in Faroe Islands and at home to Cyprus. The home win against Moldova was also a tad nervy with an early goal then held on for most of the game to win 1-0. I don’t think we need to include Israel here. As a pot 4 side, they have a genuine aim to finish 2nd and qualify for tournaments, so I’d say beating them at home and getting a point in Israel is a good outcome for us.

I do agree with this. I honestly don’t have a massive issue with some more shite teams getting in. It gives more countries a chance to watch their team at a major tournament. I reckon where we might end up is a 32 team euros but then we have the nations league A which more closely resembles the old euros (albeit played over a period of months rather than as a summer tournament) Only thing with a 64 team World Cup is that it would be very difficult to fit within the current window, and any significant expansion to the length of the tournament is off the cards. If you have a month to fit in a 64 team tournament, I’d think the idea of an extra knockout round is off the cards. You’d need to fit the groups into the same time frame as we have just now and then only the group winners qualify for the last 16. You’d also be looking at a ridiculous 8 matches per day in the group stage. I think they could just about fit six unique time slots in (starting at 12pm local time, then going in 2 hour increments until the last game at 10pm local time) but some games would need to clash. Obviously in the last round of group matches it would be a non-issue.

It’s two fold. Firstly, some of the new countries are successfully winning qualification places that could have previously gone our way. You’ve conveniently missed out the likes of Croatia, Slovenia and Ukraine who have been relatively successful in qualification events across the past 30 years. The more pressing issue however, is that in the case of Belarus, Lithuania and (especially) Georgia, whilst they’re not qualifying for tournaments, these teams are especially good at getting results against us whilst our direct rivals tend to take care of business against them. We’d have had a euro 2016 playoff against Bosnia if we had won in Georgia. We’d have qualified automatically for euro 2008 if we had won in Georgia. In 2006 qualifying we dropped points against three new countries who finished below us in the group (Moldova, Slovenia and Norway). We’d have won our group in the euro 2004 qualifiers if we’d won in Faroe Islands and Lithuania. The defeat in Kazakhstan probably didn’t make much difference because Belgium and Russia skooshed that group anyway, but that’s just another example of us coming unstuck in a hostile Eastern European environment whilst our direct qualification rivals won comfortably. If you look at our 21st century results against teams in pots 2, 3 and 4 (typically our direct rivals for qualification), I’d wager an educated guess that we’ve done pretty well against them. It’s dropping silly points to minnows that has cost us playoff spots multiple times. In many ways the recent World Cup qualifying group is the blueprint of how we should be approaching this. 12 points out of 12 against the bottom two teams. We did very well to get 4 points from both of our direct rivals. The home win against Denmark was a Brucie bonus to get a home semi final, but really results against the pot 1 team can largely be ignored.

Strachan was awful, yet somehow not even close to our worst manager of the 21st century 1. Steve Clarke 2. Walter Smith 3. Alex McLeish (v1) 4. Craig Brown - Including results from 2000 onwards only 5. Gordon Strachan 6. Alex McLeish (v2) 7. Berti Vogts 8. George Burley 9. Craig Levein

You’ve changed your tune

Men’s worlds started yesterday in Vegas. Ross Paterson’s Scotland team are 1-0 having beaten Italy overnight. South Korea and Norway to come today.

It’s been confirmed that this is happening I’m sure. I’m not opposed to expansion per se but the 3 team groups format is going to be absolutely horrific. The group stages at the moment are the most enjoyable part of the tournament but they’ll be unwatchable under this crap.

I think Norway now have the longest active drought of UEFA teams who have ever made a major finals. Previously it was us, but we ended that at Euro 2020. Norway last qualified in Euro 2000. After that, I think it's Bulgaria and Latvia who haven't qualified since 2004.

The thing with getting England in our group is that form tends to go out the window when it's a battle of Britain. Look no further than last summer's Euros. Over the course of the three games, we were comfortably the poorest team in the group, yet we were the only team England dropped points against. In fact I'd argue that the complexion of this group, should we qualify, is very similar to our group last year. I'd feel much more confident in us getting something off England than I would off any of the other seeded teams (excluding Qatar), even though England themselves are one of the strongest teams in the tournament.

It’s the same reason why Yogi’s name is constantly brought up. When times get tough the natural reaction is to go back to the last thing that worked.

I can understand why people wouldn’t want to go along. It’s hard to feel anything but apathy at this stage.

Is the meeting still ongoing? Surprised no one has posted about how it went