Arbroath1320

Fingers crossed for Ramsay but, let's face it, this could backfire spectacularly. Liverpool are not paying £4m for a first-team player.

There's also the fact that a defender who can run forward twenty yards with the ball before passing it creates space for his team mates. Having a midfielder track backwards to pick up the ball from his defenders makes the whole team slow to switch from defence into attack.

You're hoping Ramsay gets a good move? I'm not an Aberdeen fan but I've got no problems with him staying there for a year or two. Better that than going to Liverpool, never to be heard of or seen again.

I don't remember other admittedly limited but hard-working full-backs get the abuse that SOD gets. What about Ralston, Palmer or the current manager of Motherwell? SOD has given Dykes one assist and might have given Adams an assist against England had he (Adams) been able to tap in the rebound. If you're comparing SOD with Tierney or Robertson then you're demanding very high standards from him. If O'Donnell is the best available then we play him - end of story.

Sorry - disagree. If LIvramento wants to play for Scotland, there's nothing stopping him picking up the phone and giving the SFA a call or, if he wants to be discreet, telling his agent to have a quiet word with Steve Clarke. There's no dignity in a Scotland manager trying to persuade England Under-21 players to take Scotland as a second choice. The McTominay case is slightly different because he had never declared for England.

McTominay did not turn a down a call from Scotland because he wanted to play for England. It's not the same thing.

His England career is going nowhere so he will opt for his second choice.

Gothenburg were said to part-time but they beat a full-time Dundee United team (containing Scottish internationals) in the final of the UEFA Cup in 1987. Let's face it, full-time football for some can be two hours training and then into the bookies. International rugby teams used to be amateur but they still seemed to have more athleticism (and more courage) than anything you would see from full-time footballers. If a club is looking for a loan move for a player, it's because they think the experience will make him a better player. If the player thinks he's too good to go on loan to a diddy team then he's an arse. Davie Dodds went on loan to Arbroath in the early 1980s before going on to play for Scotland (and be an integral part of a Dundee United team that won the league).

Good post. Why are football clubs called "football clubs"? Because they started out as clubs where people would go to play football. If a born-and-bred Geordie goes along to St James Park and asks to join in a kickabout, what's the answer going to be?

Some of us are old enough to remember Peter Marinello ("Scotland's George Best") going to Arsenal.

If you want to talk about right-backs, start a thread about them. How difficult is that? If you post another comment, I'm not replying.

This is a thread about goalkeepers.

McGregor has retired from international competion. Clark, Gordon, MacGillivray (in that order). If McLaughlin can't nail down the Rangers No 1 jersey then he should not be in the squad.

Why can't a Scottish club have a name like Whisky Shot?

Mc started out as an abbreviation of Mac. There are no Mcs really, there are only Macs.

Hjelde is a Norwegian international. Why are we discussing him on TAMB?

Nobody wants to see good players banned but it has happened before, even to legends like Billy Bremner, because the reputation of the national team must come first. What will other nations think if they see players playing for Scotland in one competition and then for Great Britain in another? Do we really think this will be tolerated in the long term?

Yes, Denmark - same population as Scotland and were able to win Euro 92. They believe in themselves.

The use of the "f" word is a bit Freudian...

Past experience of the men's game tells us that no one playing their football in Scotland would ever get picked; the GB team would, in reality, be an English team in which the English players were topped up by players from the Celtic fringe who also happened to be playing in England. It's a disaster for the Scottish league whose clubs have not been properly supported by the SFA.

David Moyes will consider managing Scotland "when the time is right." I'm sorry but I naively believed that it was a privilege to serve your country. Your country calls when it needs you, not because your career in the EPL has come to the end of the road.

If we are going to use the Tartan Army Message Board to discuss other nations, surely it would be more productive to discuss nations with less resources than Scotland which are able to get out of the group stages of a major competition? Uruguay, Croatia, Wales, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have all done it. In the case of Wales, football is not even the national game. Nor was football even being played in Uruguay when Scotland and England played their first international but that did not stop Uruguay going on the win the World Cup twice in their first four attempts.

Jock Stein picked Souness as his captain. So now Jock Stein knows nothing?

We're not so blessed with resources that we can lose a world class player and not notice the difference. Had Tierney played, it would have been a different game. O'Donnell was good enough for the qualifying phase but now we're playing other teams that have also qualified and... well, he doesn't look so good. Patterson is young and in the squad to pick up experience; I can't see him playing against England. We're still a work in progress - strong down the left (if everyone's fit) but weaker on the right hand side.

Good luck - but I fear you are taking on an impossible task. The best players are not always the players with most caps either because of injury or perhaps because a particular player did not get on with a particular manager. You have not mentioned Dave MacKay who played on the right side of midfield and who was selected for the midfield of Alex Ferguson's best-ever Scotland eleven along with Baxter and Souness. As with any footballing nation, there are under-rated players and over-rated players. In my memory, Jim Bett and Don Hutchison were under-rated players who should have had a lot of more caps. Eddie Gray would have been remembered alongside names like George Best and Johan Cruyff but for persistent injuries that kept him out of the 1974 and 1978 World Cups.