Nationalmannschafted!

That’s how I felt on Sunday night.  And I guess that in itself shows how far this Scotland team have come since Gordon Strachan took over.  Strachan said that when Ikechi Anya equalised he believed Scotland would go on to beat the recently crowned Weltmeisters, and he had every right to think so.  As the game went on, Scotland played with an increased sense of confidence that can only come from a six-game unbeaten run and a belief in the manager and the tactics employed.

 Maybe matters are put into different perspective as we hurtle towards September 18th, but it’s hard not to compare Scotland to our southern neighbours.  For a good while now English players have looked inhibited by the very act of putting on their national shirts.  Even without much in the way of what you might call “world class” talent, they still manage to look much less that the sum of their parts.

 On the other hand, their Scottish equivalents look more and more as if they relish international football; suddenly some average players who play for average teams can go toe to toe with the best team in the world.

 No player encapsulates this more than Ikechi Anya, who may be the World’s Most Likeable Footballer (capital letters are intentional).  If you struggle to hold down a regular place in the Watford first team then you really shouldn’t be much of a threat to stars of Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.  But Strachan clearly knows how to get the best out of him and that was typified by his goal.  If my team is the underdog, then seeing one of my players one on one with the goalkeeper is pretty much my least favourite situation.  Time slows, hope builds, and it inevitably ends in crush disappointment.  But Anya was different.  Anya was Lovenkrands against Inter in 2005.  And he did it against ubermencsh Manuel Neuer!  A goalkeeper so good that he could play at centre back for Scotland!

 And yet.. we lost.  It was very good performance, but it’s impossible to shake that feeling of a chance missed.  Obviously anything from that match would have been seen as a bonus, but to miss out on even a point leaves me feeling disappointed.

Also disappointing is that central defence remains a position of relative weakness for Scotland and my heart won’t be a able cope with much more of the jittery defending that was evident in Dortmund, and which ultimately cost us the game.  And don’t get me started on Mulgrew!  Indiscipline like that really winds me up and we can ill-afford suspensions.

 But let us not dwell on the negative, for Scotland are very much on the way up, and at the very least we are in the one of the few interesting groups in the absurd qualifying format that looks interesting with three decent teams (Scotland, Ireland, and Poland) fighting for two places.

Even Platini can’t spoil our fun!


Iain Meredith (IM) is technically a Rangers fan, but these days he tends to support them ironically.  He only agreed to help with this blog because now he can tell his wife that he's "only watching the game to help a friend out".