Analysis Corner: Where Scotland went went wrong

By Dougie Wright

Following the Scottish national team seems to be an exercise in masochism. Whether glorious failure, regular failure or total embarrassment, it seems that we’re always destined to fall short.

However, that’s total nonsense. Nothing ever fails for no reason. If you’ve fallen short somewhere, it’s always worthwhile to look back on where you could have improved. Here’s a post mortem of the 2018 qualifying campaign:

Personnel

The conventional criticism of Gordon Strachan is that he’s been too loyal to the same faces. However, looking at playing time, it shows that perhaps the opposite is true. Throughout the qualifying campaign, only Andy Robertson played over 75% of available minutes.

Here’s why this is a problem.

International footballers don’t spend a lot of time together. Without a tournament, the national team manager is lucky to have his squad for around four weeks a year. That time rarely comes in a block either; it’s mostly five days here, or four days there.

This is why having a reasonably settled line up is so important on the international scene. It takes time to adjust to playing with different players; by chopping and changing all the time the players have to constantly adapt their game to suit their team-mates.

Therefore, rather than being able to actively build your own game plan, you waste time building fluency between a never ending carousel of new faces.

What’s best practice?

Consider some of the more successful small countries in recent times: Iceland and Northern Ireland. Both these sides have been built on a core of players who now practically play as coherently as club sides.

Denmark and Slovakia are both similarly sized nations to ourselves; both now find themselves in the playoffs after using a core group to see them through.

Take a look at this graph showing how many players each of the aforementioned nations had playing over 75% of available minutes this campaign compared to ourselves.

Scotland are unfortunately unlikely to ever have an abundance of world class talent in every position. We’ll never be able to sit back and let our individual players carry us to international tournaments. That means we need to forge a collective; a team of guys who know how to play better than the sum of their parts.

Talent Identification

Sadly, that was sorely lacking this campaign. Gordon Strachan was happy enough to call players up, but they rarely stayed in the team.

If you keep selecting different players all the time, you’re clearly uncertain about their ability. Granted, injuries and suspensions come into play, but they can only affect so much.

Club form should certainly not be the over-riding factor in whether or not to select a player for the national team. Does the player only look good because of his club team mates? Is his new coach playing him out of position? Has there been a fall out in the dressing room? These factors all affect club form: a good manager is able to separate the player from his club.

Has Strachan been capable of doing this?

So much turnover in squad selection suggests he still doesn’t know who he can rely on.

Optimism

Now for the good part. There are a few reasons to be optimistic:

• In isolation, 2017 has been a decent year for the national team. From the annus horriblis of 2016 (our only competitive win was against Malta), the national team is undefeated so far this year. We’re far from rock bottom.

• The next qualifer’s not until March 2019. There is plenty of time between now and then for the national team to learn from the mistakes made this time around. Furthermore, as Wales have shown, it is possible to manipulate your fixtures to boost your ranking. That could come in handy when it comes to seeding.

• There are actually a lot of good young Scottish players. Oli Burke, Kieran Tierney and Ryan Fraser are only going to improve, while Stuart Armstrong, Leigh Griffiths and Andy Robertson will be close to their peak during the next campaign. Who knows where they could take us?

Whether or not Strachan is the man for the job is up to the Scottish FA to decide. He is now out of contract, so the governing body will have to make a decision one way or another.

Many will say that two and a half failed qualifying campaigns is too many; others will argue that he’s taken a team from rock bottom to a whisker from the playoffs. In any case, it is imperative that the Scotland manager learns the lessons from this time around: find out who your best players are, then stick by them.

For more analysis like this, follow Dougie on Twitter (@dougie_wright)

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