Biggest Flops In Europe?

[Que Sera Sera]

8 hours ago, Green_Tide_Rising said:

I know  - re-read my post

The nineties success was due to largely the yugoslavian element

Post nineties - is due to home technical development up until the age of 16, european clubs and all round better infrastructure within their F.A

Just checked. Croatia have qualified for 9/11 finals since independence, which to my mind makes them one of the best 10 teams in Europe in terms of consistency. Also makes a mockery of your population argument. Scotland have been hit by two things: a decline in the quality of our players and many good new nations in European qualifying.

[Green_Tide_Rising]

49 minutes ago, Que Sera Sera said:

Just checked. Croatia have qualified for 9/11 finals since independence, which to my mind makes them one of the best 10 teams in Europe in terms of consistency. Also makes a mockery of your population argument. Scotland have been hit by two things: a decline in the quality of our players and many good new nations in European qualifying.

 

 

I never said Croatia had a big population. My population point was related to 7/8 teams in the OP list....croatia were not one of those

Its a fair point to say countries who have bigger playing pools and better infrastructures are going to qualify more. Its basic common sense actually

I aleady know how many tournaments croatia have qualified for.....if you read my post properly ....you will see I said they have qualified alot in the last decade because of a good underage infrastructure not because of a large population.

Scotland have been hit by a decline in quality which ultimately is down a poor underage structure and been stuck in the dark ages teaching kids the technical side of the game, the same applies to the republic....Croatia have not been stuck in the dark ages and focus on teaching their kids the proper technical side of the game thus allowing them to grow with the other nations in europe ....while we have been left behind.

 

Even going back to that great Yugoslavia setup that produced so many great croatian players that did so well up until world cup 1998  ....they didnt make euro 2000 cos we knocked them out.....from that team Boban, Stanic, Prosinecki etc were apart of the Yugoslavian U20 team that won the 1987 world cup.

 

"Scotland have been hit by two things: a decline in the quality of our players and many good new nations in European qualifying."....yes due to yere poor infrastructure compared to the better infrastructure of other good european nations but having a bigger pool of players to choose from does help generate success!

 

I really dont know why you are trying to find a loop hole in my point  - if you read it properly , you will find we are pretty much on the same page.

Edited March 3, 2016 by Green_Tide_Rising

[scoobydoo]

Scotland are dire and it won't change any time soon. 

[todd]

6 hours ago, scoobydoo said:

Scotland are dire and it won't change any time soon. 

Very insightful!  How so?  Because we had one poor game against Georgia?  We're a decent side, no more, no less but I don't think we're dire. I really can't get my head round how shit we have become in some peoples minds, basically 'cause we screwed up qualifying on, essentially, one game!

I apologise in advance if my naive positivity has offended anyone on the board. 

[DoonTheSlope]

45 minutes ago, todd said:

Very insightful!  How so?  Because we had one poor game against Georgia?  We're a decent side, no more, no less but I don't think we're dire. I really can't get my head round how shit we have become in some peoples minds, basically 'cause we screwed up qualifying on, essentially, one game!

I apologise in advance if my naive positivity has offended anyone on the board. 

Two games. Playing for the draw in Dublin was incomprehensible. First half we were abysmal, Second half when Anya came on we were all over them but WGS shat it and took Naismith/Maloney(an attacker anyway) off for defender Berra to sit in

As soon as we rid ourselves of this "a draw will do away to xxxx" then maybe we might start progress 

The less said about the Georgia debacle the better

Edited March 5, 2016 by DoonTheSlope

[Orraloon]

6 hours ago, todd said:

Very insightful!  How so?  Because we had one poor game against Georgia?  We're a decent side, no more, no less but I don't think we're dire. I really can't get my head round how shit we have become in some peoples minds, basically 'cause we screwed up qualifying on, essentially, one game!

I apologise in advance if my naive positivity has offended anyone on the board. 

We won 4 games in the entire campaign and 2 of those wins were against Gibraltar. That's why folk think we are pish.

[jock strap]

10 hours ago, Orraloon said:

We won 4 games in the entire campaign and 2 of those wins were against Gibraltar. That's why folk think we are pish.

Spot on. 

[Boynze]

we are the biggest flipped in Europe because we bottle it when it really matters every. Single. Time.

 

and have done for the last 40years or more.

 

it's our mental strength that is our weakness, and history shows that.

[one t in scotland]

On 3 March 2016 at 3:59 AM, Que Sera Sera said:

Not qualified for a major finals since '98:

Scotland

Finland

Belarus

Israel

Cyprus

Montenegro

Estonia

Faeroe Islands

Azerbaijan

Georgia

Armenia

Lithuania

Kazakhstan

Macedonia

Luxembourg

Moldova

Malta

Liechtenstein

San Marino

Andorra

The fact that out of these serial no hopers I'd only be confident of taking 6 points off the last 2 sums up why we'll never see the World Cup again. 

[DoonTheSlope]

1 hour ago, one t in scotland said:

The fact that out of these serial no hopers I'd only be confident of taking 6 points off the last 2 sums up why we'll never see the World Cup again. 

Good point

[Que Sera Sera]

On 05/03/2016 at 3:26 PM, DoonTheSlope said:

Two games. Playing for the draw in Dublin was incomprehensible. First half we were abysmal, Second half when Anya came on we were all over them but WGS shat it and took Naismith/Maloney(an attacker anyway) off for defender Berra to sit in

As soon as we rid ourselves of this "a draw will do away to xxxx" then maybe we might start progress 

The less said about the Georgia debacle the better

I thought we controlled the game in Dublin and our possession took the tempo out of the game, which didn't suit Ireland. A point away to qualifying rivals who we'd already beaten at home is far from incomprehensible.

On 06/03/2016 at 9:06 PM, Orraloon said:

We won 4 games in the entire campaign and 2 of those wins were against Gibraltar. That's why folk think we are pish.

And only lost 3 and 2 of those were against very impressive World champions.

On 07/03/2016 at 4:47 PM, one t in scotland said:

The fact that out of these serial no hopers I'd only be confident of taking 6 points off the last 2 sums up why we'll never see the World Cup again. 

Extremely negative.

[ProudScot]

15 minutes ago, Que Sera Sera said:

I thought we controlled the game in Dublin and our possession took the tempo out of the game, which didn't suit Ireland. A point away to qualifying rivals who we'd already beaten at home is far from incomprehensible.

And only lost 3 and 2 of those were against very impressive World champions.

Extremely negative.

I'd say pretty accurate actually.

We are rock bottom at the moment and need to rebuild and cut out dead wood and as much old pish as we possibly can

[Dalgety Bay TA]

4 hours ago, ProudScot said:

I'd say pretty accurate actually.

We are rock bottom at the moment and need to rebuild and cut out dead wood and as much old pish as we possibly can

If you think we are rock bottom at the moment you must have slept through the Burley/Levein era. 

 

In relation to the group that just was, we went in as 4th seeds and finished 4th, so we performed as expected. We were undefeated home and away v 2 teams/seeds who finished just above us and ran World Champions quite close in both games. We facked up in Georgia, our one under performance. What we didn't expect was both Poland and Ireland beating a Germany side at home who normally piss qualifying usually unbeaten. If we had been in a group like N Ireland's, with the other sides performing as they did in the NI group, I am pretty sure we would be going to France.

[ErsatzThistle]

5 hours ago, ProudScot said:

I'd say pretty accurate actually.

We are rock bottom at the moment and need to rebuild and cut out dead wood and as much old pish as we possibly can

I disagree that we are at rock bottom - that would be when we were drawing 2-2 with the Faroes or getting an extremely undeserved last minute winner against Liechtenstein.

But I do strongly agree with you that we need to ditch the dead wood and soon.

Scott Brown and Alan Hutton may have been good servants in the past but memories of good games they played years ago won't help us rack up points in future. They need to go. People need to wave goodbye to their favourites.

And then you've got others that kid themselves on that Steven Fletcher is a top quality striker who's just been going through an unfortunate bad spell ............... for the last three or four years.

One thing I feel strongly about is that we must give our young players a chance and also not get carried away and build them up too much. Which leads me to a few points about young Scottish players.

I'm totally against this idea some have that you must first "serve your apprenticeship" in the Under 21s before going onto the senior team. Fück that old fashioned nonsense ! If a player is eighteen or nineteen years old and has a bit of skill, then throw them right in at the deep end. These young players need us to cheer them on and encourage them, not moan because they make a mistake or take an older players place in the squad.

Young players make mistakes on the park, they also say and do stupid things off it. When they do, don't call for them to be banned from selection or daft things like that. Look at a certain James McFadden who was for a time a badly behaved kid on and off the park, only to became a model professional and a Scotland legend.

I wish we didn't have the same obsessives who breathlessly report on every single move of Scottish youth team players. I can't be alone in thinking that it's actually quite creepy and really sad that grown men will scour the internet for details on Scottish sixteen and seventeen year olds playing for youth teams down south. 

We should wait until they start to play semi-regular first team games before we take notice of them. Just let them play and get on with it until then, a few of them won't even be in senior football beyond the age of twenty one. Building young players up isn't good for them and it gets us all down when they inevitably fail to make the grade. Be realistic.

Edited March 15, 2016 by ErsatzThistle

[Toepoke]

1 hour ago, Dalgety Bay TA said:

In relation to the group that just was, we went in as 4th seeds and finished 4th, so we performed as expected.

That's not going to get us to a tournament any time soon though...

 

[DoonTheSlope]

6 minutes ago, Toepoke said:

That's not going to get us to a tournament any time soon though...

 

And it's certainly not an improvement, many on here would have you believe it is though

[DoonTheSlope]

7 hours ago, Que Sera Sera said:

I thought we controlled the game in Dublin and our possession took the tempo out of the game, which didn't suit Ireland. A point away to qualifying rivals who we'd already beaten at home is far from incomprehensible.

And only lost 3 and 2 of those were against very impressive World champions.

Extremely negative.

As I said in my op, that is exactly the problem, settling for draws away to x, y and z. It's a losers mentality which is bringing us further and further down

[Dalgety Bay TA]

39 minutes ago, Toepoke said:

That's not going to get us to a tournament any time soon though...

 

Of course it isn't but we are not going backwards, as some would have you believe. As I said at end of the post, if we had been in an easier group, even as 4th seeds, I feel we would have qualified. We were in a very hard group with some difficult teams, two of which certainly over performed in games v Germany.

33 minutes ago, DoonTheSlope said:

And it's certainly not an improvement, many on here would have you believe it is though

Anything is an improvement on being one of the first teams to be out of running for qualification as we were in previous tournament. 

31 minutes ago, DoonTheSlope said:

As I said in my op, that is exactly the problem, settling for draws away to x, y and z. It's a losers mentality which is bringing us further and further down

I don't think anyone settled, it's not a losers mentality. Two things from Dublin...firstly both teams were out on their feet in the last 15 mins of that game after a long hard season with some players not having played competitive football for 4 weeks. At that point losing through a silly mistake would have been horrendous.

 

Secondly we had already beaten them in Scotland, not losing in Dublin put us ahead of them in the H2Hs. Yes it would have been great if we had won but I don't think you would have found many people, post game, who thought that the draw was a poor result. The smart thinking towards the end of that game was not letting Ireland get back on level standing with us. 

[Toepoke]

2 hours ago, Dalgety Bay TA said:

Of course it isn't but we are not going backwards, as some would have you believe. As I said at end of the post, if we had been in an easier group, even as 4th seeds, I feel we would have qualified. We were in a very hard group with some difficult teams, two of which certainly over performed in games v Germany.

Appreciate your positivity and I agree our group was a stinker, but then I'm not so sure we could've pulled off some of Northern Ireland's results like winning away in Greece and Hungary, especially with our current defence.

It's all ifs and buts now though, let the next campaign be the proof...