Upcoming Friendlies

[Caledonian Craig]

We have two upcoming friendlies comng up against England and France in the next month or so. I know a few people here do not like the choice of teams as they'd sooner see us play 'easier' opponents to keep our winning run going. I disagree.

If, as it looks like, we qualify for the Euros we are going to have to play teams of the quality of England and France. And beyond that we will face top quality sides in the Nations League following our promotion. We need to test ourselves against the best or we will be in for a shock when we play top quality sides. You only get betterby playing against the best so matches against Jamaica,  New Zealand, Jordan etc etc are of no use to us.

Thoughts?

[DesiScotsman]

I agree with your post. I personally prefer it when we play the so called tougher nations. Gives the players a proper test and we learn a lot more about them as a team in terms of what their true strengths are but more so the weaknesses that need improvement which the better teams will exploit. We know we are going to be properly tested against a higher calibre of quality player actions the opposition.

Very much looking forward to both the England & France games.

Edited September 9, 2023 by DesiScotsman

[Texas Pete]

I don’t mind that we are playing England and France. I’m just glad that both friendlies are after our qualifiers and not the other way round. 

Going to Spain after a potential doing in France may not have been the best idea confidence wise. 

We will, of course, beat England comfortably so the order of games wouldn’t have mattered in this international break. 😂

[Clyde1998]

I think these are the right sort of friendlies for us, given our current situation. If our objective is to get into the knockout stages of the Euros, which it should be, then these are the type of sides we need to be able to compete with (even if these are sides who should beat us on paper) and they'll provide a good understanding of what our level is. We should learn a lot from these friendlies, which will hopefully put us in a better position for the Euros (assuming we don't mess qualifying up now) and Nations League A (after the Euros).

As others have said, I'm happy we're playing them after the qualifiers - as I wouldn't want to expend all our energy on friendlies and have that affect our competitive matches (even if we're 99% of the way to qualifying now).

[Diamond Scot]

I agree with the sentiment of the original post and a lot has to do with who is available however instead of playing the absolute top tier Euro teams like France, England (Germany), I would rather we played the slightly lower top tier teams like Portugal, Holland and maybe Italy.