dezmondo

Having to do Dublin as a day trip which is far from ideal. Same day flights with Ryanair £160 😢 (x2 for me and my son). Last flight out of Dublin is at 8.55pm which means I'll need to leave the game no later than 6.45/slightly early and even then I'll be cutting it fine!

Maybe I was slightly off the mark with 1000 but i really don't see a massive travelling support and I'd bet there will be nowhere near over 5000. Between potential Covid travel issues, the risk of booking now and only a few days to arrange foreign travel when prices will rocket.....i can't see the normal numbers of our travelling support. Wales would be different but Austria? No chance. Not to mention folk will be keeping 2 weeks holidays for Qatar 😉

For anyone that doesn't realise, the next Nations league draw is approaching, to be drawn on Thursday 16th December, fixtures to be published 17th December. Quite surprised to see there are 4 fixtures in quick succession in June from 2nd June to 14th June. The other 2 fixtures will be played in September. We are pot 2 in league B. We will draw one from each of: - Ukraine, Sweden, Bosnia, Iceland - Israel 🙈, Ireland, Romania, Serbia - Slovenia, Montenegro, Albania, Armenia Another busy year in 2022....bring it on 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Is anyone gambling and booking travel to one or both potential play off final opponents? If we get through and play Austria I can't imagine more than 1000 travelling. I'm very tempted to take the punt and book travel to both. It doesn't appear too expensive currently 🤔

So who has the lowdown on the best pubs or gathering points? I was there in 2004 but no idea where we ended up.

Yeah, I'm on both air moldova flights. Both put back by about an hour. Bit of a pain as I've decided to fly home from Heathrow at 6.45 which means I'll now likely miss my booked bus from Stansted to Heathrow and may need to get a taxi! I'm looking at it positively in that surely if they were cancelling it they would have did it by now 🤔

What's the 6 digit personal code?

Did the SSC send out their usual email asking who intended to travel to get an idea of numbers? I expect no more than 800 to travel to this so you would have thought it would be good for them to have an idea of this going forward.

Really hard to gauge how many folk will travel to this.....500?? Do we think there will be any scope to get a hold of home end tickets?

Anyone know what Moldova is like currently with regards to Covid? My flights got messed about but planning to rebook. Don't know if it's worth it if restaurants and bars will be closed.

As someone who is slightly confused about the travel restrictions, can someone answer a question. - if you are flying out to Moldova from England, under the new rules, i assume we don't need any PCR testing on return even though we'll fly to Scotland after returning to london?? Hopefully Moldova doesn't move to the red list 🤞

Exactly. If football was simply about who had the better team on paper then there would be no point playing any matches! The acceptance from some fans is sickening. There are plenty of teams punching above their weight and there is nothing to stop us from doing similar with the squad of players we now have. I mean FFS, Wales knocked out Belgium 5 years ago!! Our expectations should be higher, we should be asking questions and we should be performing better. I'm certain results will not improve and we'll appoint another manager who won't be brave enough to take us forward.

Anyone who thinks we're qualifying for the World Cup under Clarke needs help. We have no chance of 1st place and i reckon about a 20% chance of 2nd place which would still leave us with a monumental task to qualify. Denmark will unfortunately absolutely wipe the floor with us, we might get a draw in one of the matches but that'll be it. We'll struggle to beat Israel again and it's hard to see us getting a win in Austria. Would another manager have us competing better? It's difficult to say but the results have been pretty poor under Clarke and there is nothing to suggest we're going to start beating teams higher ranked than us. I'm really struggling to see progress - this word that seems to get banded about in relation to scotland managers. All I know is that there are quite a few teams who have squads with similar or less quality than ours but continue to perform, compete and punch above their weight. Sadly this is something we don't do. We are definitely capable of so much more. I think the manager has to partially carry the can for that. Anything less than 4 points from the next 3 games and I'd be saying thanks and goodbye Steve.

Has anyone been to the family area in the fan zone? Have tickets with the kids on Saturday evening but don't know if it looks up to much or worth going now. Cheers

It's a football forum. We're allowed an opinion on everything football related including the management. You do know that a manager of Scotland is managing at that level and not a higher level for a reason, and therefore probably gets some things wrong.....which we are allowed to discuss 😂😂 We had 2 matches at home and lost by 2 in each. That's a poor performance for me. Croatia are a good side but as I said, a poorer Scotland side beat a better Croatia side home and away in the not too distant past, so they were beatable last night. They looked average for 135 minutes of the tournament before they played us, and part of the reason for that is they were made to look average, England and Czechia got their tactics correct. As someone who apparently knows jack, I thought it was blindingly obvious early on we were getting pummelled down the right side and overrun in midfield. You're not telling me Patterson on and an extra midfielder on wouldn't have made a difference? I tell you what, it wouldn't have made us worse and at least would have given us fresh legs when half the team looked heavy legged. But hey, i shouldn't be questioning Clark the messiah. 😂 As a fan I'll support the team but I'll also demand more.

I must be watching a different team because we are miles behind other teams and I see zero progress since Strachan. I'm sick of hearing this word 'progress', I've been hearing time and time again since i started following Scotland and it's just a way of papering over the cracks. I called it out under Levein and I'm calling it out again. Drawing 2 games and winning 2 penalty shootouts to qualify for a tournament via a new back door route isn't progress. Just because Croatia are technically better than us doesn't give them a right to beat us. Does nobody remember we beat a better Croatia home and away previously? Has anyone actually looked at a list of results in the past 5 years, it makes for hideous reading! If people want to accept that this is our level and it's to be expected in relation to how we qualified then that's their choice but it's typical of the happy clapping tartan army acceptance. When are we going to start demanding more? We have arguably our best squad in years yet we get put out without a whimper, our worst Euros performance to date. All when a team like Wales and others continue to progress through the group stages. Has Clarke done a good job? Bang average for me. I'm sure there's someone out there who could get more from these players. I'm worried at his inability to change things when it's glaringly obvious it's not working. Last Monday it was obvious after 15 minutes the game was crying out for Gilmour. Last night it was inexcusable it took so long to make changes. Thank god for Graeme Souness, the only pundit brave enough to say it as it is.

I can't believe folk are saying 'ah well, they have better players than us', like that's an excuse for getting beat. FFS, if that was the case then let's not bother ever playing a game of football again and just award the win to the team with the better players! Does anyone actually remember we beat a better Croatia side home and away with a poorer Scotland team previously?? Too many folk (not exclusively here) accepting we got to a tournament and tried our best. No wonder our nation continues to flounder with attitudes like this. We shouldn't be accepting it, we should be asking questions. Questions like why can Wales progress through the knockout stages? Why can Iceland at the last tournament over perform? Why should we accept that a country like Croatia with a similar population are better than us? Anyone who thinks progress is being made is deluded. Our results have been terrible for years. Have a look for yourself and you'll see we've hardly beaten anyone of note over 90 minutes in 5 years. We are absolutely under performing! Is it the manager? I don't know, but he definitely got a lot wrong this tournament. A blind guy could see Patterson from his cameo tonight is a level above O' Donnell......why not bring him on earlier in the half and give him a chance. As much as football is about scoring goals, for me our problem how we defend. England only scored 1 more goal than us and finished top of the group. We consistently give away cheap goals. Every single goal in this tournament we conceded was completely avoidable and cheap. When we qualified for euro 96 and France 98 we only conceded 3 goals in each of the whole qualifying campaigns! Now we regularly ship 3 in a single game. For me it's defenders not being able to concentrate for a full 90 minutes. Lapses of concentration at this level kill you. Teams with poorer defenders than us defend better. Who knows where we go from here

I'd say it's pretty much nailed on we will be back at Hampden if we win tomorrow. Playing the winners of Spain's group which looks like Sweden currently

Woke up and started writing a Facebook post but I ended up writing a poem😂 Can't believe it's now finally here, Scotland's first game at a tournament in 23 year. We've wondered, we've feared, we'd never get here again, Then one night in Serbia, big Marsh saved a pen. The hurt, tears and pain, the constant failed trying, But that night in November, the unicorn stopped crying. A generation of kids wondering what they'd just seen, "just wait til June 14th son, you'll see what I mean" The atmosphere building The nation coming together, We love our small country, yesterday, today and forever Today there'll be tears, beers and hopes of a goal so sublime, COME ON SCOTLAND, THIS IS OUR TIME 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I'm on 13 points, missing out on the home matches but enough for England match. To be fair I'm not particularly interested in going to the matches given the expected soulless experience but I find it appalling that we only got 15% of the tickets considering there will be very few 'away' fans.

Check your inboxes. 15 points for Hampden matches, 13 for England.

Pm'd you 👍

These still available mate? Asking for a friend 👍

I can't believe I'm saying this but I'm really not fussed about getting a ticket and going to a quarter full Hampden. I'd much rather watch it in the house with a few mates than being socially distant in a stadium that I find soulless when half full never mind quarter full.

Nobody is demanding first but in a group without any of the big hitters there is no reason that we should not be aiming for first. Being 2nd on Wednesday evening counts for absolutely hee-haw. I'm fairly confident that Austria will hit 21 points, despite them being beaten by Israel previously I expect them to take 6 points off israel unfortunately. On current form it'll take something very 6 special for us to hit 20 points. I'd say we're more likely to drop points away to the Faroes than pick up points away to Austria and Denmark.