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2 Wins away...


GaryWood34

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5 minutes ago, dohadeer said:

Yeah, I was going to compile a full list this evening when I get home, but that is indeed an awful lot of dropped points.

As I thought, that doesn’t look like such a decent home record at all! Although I’m sure that some of those are longer than 10 years ago.

Over the last 2 months we have a 100% home record. 10 years seems a bit arbitrary.

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3 minutes ago, Texas Pete said:

Maybe I should’ve said Scottish people (excluding footballers) have as much bottle as anyone. 😂

Seriously though, why would you assume that? Plenty of Scots have been involved in penalty shootouts over the years. I don’t have any memory of major bottle crashes.

We won’t know until if/when it happens. 

I’d assume that British people in general have below-average levels of ‘bottle.’

Unless you were just making a pun about us being heavy-drinkers?!

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6 minutes ago, Texas Pete said:

Maybe I should’ve said Scottish people (excluding footballers) have as much bottle as anyone. 😂

Seriously though, why would you assume that? Plenty of Scots have been involved in penalty shootouts over the years. I don’t have any memory of major bottle crashes.

We won’t know until if/when it happens. 

Try telling that to Dundee Utd fans. :lol:

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1 minute ago, Orraloon said:

Over the last 2 months we have a 100% home record. 10 years seems a bit arbitrary.

How do you mean?

I’m just responding to someone else’s claim. They chose 10 years and I’d agree that that is probably a reasonable amount of time to be recent enough to be significant, and also give a large enough sample size to analyse.

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4 minutes ago, ceudmilefailte said:

Thanks for putting the information up, just saying that showing we only lose to good teams doesn't mean we beat all teams nearer our own level.

Absolutely! But it does show that we don't tend to lose in 90 mins at Hampden, which in this time of real negativity is something I'm trying to hold onto. 

For the record. I do not expect us to qualify. 

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8 minutes ago, dohadeer said:

How do you mean?

I’m just responding to someone else’s claim. They chose 10 years and I’d agree that that is probably a reasonable amount of time to be recent enough to be significant, and also give a large enough sample size to analyse.

Aye, I thought I was responding to him to be honest. Mistaken identity.

We haven't qualified for 20 years. Back in the days when we qualified for 6 WCs out of 7, our away record wasn't much better than it is now. It's our home record that has changed. Back then we had a very good home record. Not now though and that is why we have stopped qualifying.

 

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2 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Aye, I thought I was responding to him to be honest. Mistaken identity.

We haven't qualified for 20 years. Back in the days when we qualified for 6 WCs out of 7, our away record wasn't much better than it is now. It's our home record that has changed. Back then we had a very good home record. Not now though and that is why we have stopped qualifying.

 

Possibly but it should be remembered that two away games against Georgia and a game in Dublin we had a great chance of winning cost us heavily over the last couple of campaigns. 

The only real home game disaster we’ve had recently is against Lithuania and probably the two games we opened with in    Levein’s disastrous campaign. Unless you count Russia but we were as good as out by then. 

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22 minutes ago, Texas Pete said:

Possibly but it should be remembered that two away games against Georgia and a game in Dublin we had a great chance of winning cost us heavily over the last couple of campaigns. 

The only real home game disaster we’ve had recently is against Lithuania and probably the two games we opened with in    Levein’s disastrous campaign. Unless you count Russia but we were as good as out by then. 

We got humped by Belgium and Russia. Those are the sort of home games we were winning when we used to qualify on a regular basis. Now it's hard to imagine how we can win a game against that level of opposition.

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18 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

We got humped by Belgium and Russia. Those are the sort of home games we were winning when we used to qualify on a regular basis. Now it's hard to imagine how we can win a game against that level of opposition.

I take your point about teams of Russia’s level but Belgium? Did we used to beat the best team in the world (or Europe) regularly when we qualified? 

The last group we got out of had Austria and Sweden in it. Decent teams who we beat at home (how we won that game at Ibrox I’ll never know) but hardly on the level that Belgium are at now. 

The group before we had Finland and Russia. We beat Finland at home but not Russia. 

Euro 92 qualifying is a bit fuzzy but I’m sure we had an easy group and failed to beat Bulgaria at home? We did beat France at home in the World Cup qualifiers for Italia 90 but they weren’t very good at the time. We failed to beat Yugoslavia at home. 

Anything before this I can’t comment on without Googling it but the point is you don’t always need to beat the best team in the group at home to qualify.

If we could get into Pot 2 somehow we would improve our chances no end. 

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8 minutes ago, Texas Pete said:

I take your point about teams of Russia’s level but Belgium? Did we used to beat the best team in the world (or Europe) regularly when we qualified? 

The last group we got out of had Austria and Sweden in it. Decent teams who we beat at home (how we won that game at Ibrox I’ll never know) but hardly on the level that Belgium are at now. 

The group before we had Finland and Russia. We beat Finland at home but not Russia. 

Euro 92 qualifying is a bit fuzzy but I’m sure we had an easy group and failed to beat Bulgaria at home? We did beat France at home in the World Cup qualifiers for Italia 90 but they weren’t very good at the time. We failed to beat Yugoslavia at home. 

Anything before this I can’t comment on without Googling it but the point is you don’t always need to beat the best team in the group at home to qualify.

If we could get into Pot 2 somehow we would improve our chances no end. 

We knocked out Czechoslovakia twice, we beat them at Hampden in another qualifier, but then got knocked out by them in a playoff. We beat Sweden and drew with Portugal on the way to Spain 82 (can't remember which of those two were top seeds), we beat Spain on the way to WC86, France for 1990. OK we had an easier draw for 1998.

We also beat Italy at Hampden and still didn't manage to qualify. 

We can't even give the pot two teams a decent game at home nowadays. 

Teams used to come to Hampden more in hope than expectation. Now even the weakest teams in the group see Hampden as one of their best chances of getting an away point.

 

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3 hours ago, Orraloon said:

When it comes to home games the important stat isn't "not losing". If you want to qualify you need to "win" your home games. On top of your list we have failed to beat Lithuania, England, Czech Rep, Poland, Slovenia, Norway (twice), Belarus, Italy, and Netherlands. And that's just off the top of my head. There are probably others. We needed 8 minutes of injury time to beat Liechtenstein. 

We won't win a play off by "not losing". I don't fancy our chances in a penalty shot out.

Wales only dropped 2 points at home, and that was to the top seeds. That's why they have qualified.

Mrniaboc’s defeat list goes back 10 years. You are going back a lot further. Slovenia 2004, Belarus 2005 and the last time we didn’t beat Norway was 2008.

I think it does highlight the reason we don’t qualify. As well as having a dodgy away record, our home record against the teams seeded above us is pretty poor. If we are 3rd seeds and finish third, we are not going to qualify for anything.

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1 hour ago, Ta Ta said:

Mrniaboc’s defeat list goes back 10 years. You are going back a lot further. Slovenia 2004, Belarus 2005 and the last time we didn’t beat Norway was 2008.

I think it does highlight the reason we don’t qualify. As well as having a dodgy away record, our home record against the teams seeded above us is pretty poor. If we are 3rd seeds and finish third, we are not going to qualify for anything.

Not true

This campaign has been worse, in part as Russia didn't really drop points and beat us at Hampden

However I'm sure there is a stat that if we had beaten the bottom two seeds in our groups since 98, we would have qualified or play offd each time

But we always fuck up at least once against the dross

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1 hour ago, Bino's said:

Not true

This campaign has been worse, in part as Russia didn't really drop points and beat us at Hampden

However I'm sure there is a stat that if we had beaten the bottom two seeds in our groups since 98, we would have qualified or play offd each time

But we always fuck up at least once against the dross

12 points against the bottom two seeds would rarely be enough for the play offs, let alone be enough to reach the play offs every time.

 

I think that that claim is very incorrect.

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53 minutes ago, dohadeer said:

12 points against the bottom two seeds would rarely be enough for the play offs, let alone be enough to reach the play offs every time.

 

I think that that claim is very incorrect.

Ok, I think I understand now.....

IF we had taken full points against the bottom two seeds, on top of any other points we actually accumulated in other matches, we would have at least reached the playoffs.

 

Researching this now makes for several unbelievable statistics!

Firstly, in the 11 qualifying campaigns since 1998, when we last qualified, we have only taken a maximum 12 points against the bottom two seeds in our group on one occasion. Now, international football is tricky, and I certainly wouldn't expect us to always beat the bottom two seeds, especially away. Some of the bottom two seeds we have faced in that time have been teams who turned out to be very good. However, I'd expect us to take the maximum 12 points more than once in 11 campaigns! That is a horrific performance.

The only manager who achieved the feat was Craig Brown, in the qualifying campaign for World Cup 2002. The campaign was still unsuccessful though, and we didn't even reach the playoffs. Vogts, Smith, McLeish during both his tenures, Burley, Levein and Strachan all suffered not only slip-ups against at least one of the bottom two seeds in the group, but amazingly they've all suffered defeats against at least one of the bottom two seeds!

Next amazing stat is that, these results against the bottom two seeds made a difference to whether we failed to qualify/made the playoffs/qualified automatically on SEVEN occasions out of the 9 relevant qualifying groups where we slipped up against the bottom teams. 

Amazingly, if we had won all games against the bottom two seeds, and we added those results to our actual results in the other group games, instead of only having two playoffs to show for those 9 qualifying campaigns in question, we'd have 6 playoffs and 2 automatic qualifications!

Unbelievable, and I'm not sure why this hasn't been more widely spoken about!

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OK I have run some more representative numbers for us to take a look at. The following is the percentage of available points we took from competitive home matches per decade:

1990s - 81.94%

2000s - 65.22%

2010s - 61.54%

So there's been an obvious drop-off, however over 60% of possible points taken at home (including matches against top seeds) isn't such a horrible home record. Also, as other posters have pointed out, it's hard to list too many teams that aren't clearly above our level that have taken points from us at home in recent history. 

From whatever angle I look at I simply cannot see these playoffs as anything other than the best chance we may ever have to qualify for a tournament any time soon.

Edited by mrniaboc
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Guest ElChris04

We really should be doing everything possible to convince Allan McGregor to come out retirement and play in the playoffs, surly he would want in on what he played part in helping us reach?

sorry, but Marshall is absolutely dreadful at this level now, shame since he was a good keeper in his day but he’s well and truly finished at this level. 
 

if failing to convince McGregor, we need to hope Scott Bain has had game time as hes by far our best keeper who isn’t retired. And failing that.. Liam Kelly has resurrected his form at qpr and has improved significantly since March. 
 

lastly, I’m personally glad these games are in March and not next month. 1. There’s clearly some of our best players with injury ,fitness, other off field issues who are unable to play. For me March is just enough time to hopefully see the likes of Griffiths,Souttar,Tierney back and some players who have been out of form to get back into it. Also hope by March Gilmour and Mikey Johnston have found there way back in the first team of there clubs and are building momentum. With belief under Clarke and our best players but we need absolutely everything we have. Here’s hoping it’ll be enough come March with things falling into place. 

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3 minutes ago, mrniaboc said:

OK I have run some more representative numbers for us to take a look at. The following is the percentage of available points we took from competitive home matches per decade:

1990s - 81.94%

2000s - 65.22%

2010s - 61.54%

So there's been an obvious drop-off, however over 60% of possible points taken at home (including matches against top seeds) isn't such a horrible home record. Also, as other posters have pointed out, it's hard to list too many teams that aren't clearly above our level that have taken points from us at home in recent history. 

From whatever angle I look at I simply cannot see these playoffs as anything other than the best chance we may ever have to qualify for a tournament any time soon.

I think the most obvious reason that our percentages have dropped is that we have got much, much worse.

However, I'd assume that home win percentages are down in football in general, as the game gets more and more defensive, and counter-attacking 4-5-1 away from home is a much easier art form than coming out and attacking and breaking teams down when you are the home team, who have higher expectations/pressure of gaining the three points.

 

I think as other people mentioned, there are plenty of non-big teams who have taken points off us at home recently. I think that you are mistaken in that assertion. If we look at a ten year time frame, it's Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Wales, Macedonia, Serbia, and Czech Republic. That's seven slip-ups in the last five campaigns, WITHOUT including any of the 'big teams.' We've dropped points every single time against the big team, on top of that, so that takes us up to 12 home slip-ups in the past 5 campaigns. That is a fairly horrible record, the opposite of your claim in fact.

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9 minutes ago, ElChris04 said:

We really should be doing everything possible to convince Allan McGregor to come out retirement and play in the playoffs, surly he would want in on what he played part in helping us reach?

sorry, but Marshall is absolutely dreadful at this level now, shame since he was a good keeper in his day but he’s well and truly finished at this level. 
 

if failing to convince McGregor, we need to hope Scott Bain has had game time as hes by far our best keeper who isn’t retired. And failing that.. Liam Kelly has resurrected his form at qpr and has improved significantly since March. 
 

lastly, I’m personally glad these games are in March and not next month. 1. There’s clearly some of our best players with injury ,fitness, other off field issues who are unable to play. For me March is just enough time to hopefully see the likes of Griffiths,Souttar,Tierney back and some players who have been out of form to get back into it. Also hope by March Gilmour and Mikey Johnston have found there way back in the first team of there clubs and are building momentum. With belief under Clarke and our best players but we need absolutely everything we have. Here’s hoping it’ll be enough come March with things falling into place. 

Pretty disrespectful to David Marshall I think. Not that the goalkeeper position makes much difference, and I've never been a big believer in these £70 million goalkeepers nowadays, as I think that most top-level professional goalkeepers are of a similar standard, there's little difference that they make on a game, but I certainly think the difference between David Marshall and Allan McGregor would be pretty minimal. In my opinion I'd edge the other way and prefer Marshall.

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