Most of Scottish Twitter has been enjoying itself greatly for the last few hours after England’s exit from the World Cup, but scattered in amongst the amusing memes has been a fair amount of angst about victors Croatia – a nation of 4 million people – being in the final when Scotland once again failed to qualify.
And while we’ll more than happily listen to any amount of criticism of the unbelievably incompetent, hapless clowns who’ve been in charge of the SFA/SPL/SPFL for the last several decades, that judgement is a bit harsh on the players and coaches and the nation as a whole. Because there really hasn’t been much in it.
Scotland’s qualification for World Cup 2018 hinged and ultimately faltered on a split second and a single badly-chosen pass in stoppage time.
That really is how close it was.
Because if Stuart Armstrong had passed the ball into the acres of empty space on his left in the dying moments of the June 2017 qualifier against England at Hampden Park with Scotland leading 2-1, rather than trying a pointlessly harder pass to the right, we’d have held on, taken three points instead of one, and finished the group in 2nd place with 20 points – exactly the same position and points total that Croatia got from their own six-team group, with the same number of wins and draws.
That would have seen us finish joint third in the table of the top-runners-up, displacing the Republic Of Ireland in the playoffs.
That would have meant having a two-legged tie against the likes of Greece, Northern Ireland, Sweden or – funnily enough – Croatia, who Scotland have never lost to.
And while of course Scotland are more than capable of losing a playoff to any of those teams, they’re also more than capable of winning one. And that would have sent us to the finals, where who knows, we might have landed almost as favourable a draw as England did and made some progress in a tournament where all the big teams bowed out early and the competition was wide open.
The statistics above pretty clearly show that we are not a significantly worse side than Croatia (who won four of their qualifiers 1-0 and dropped points to lowly Finland just like Scotland did with Lithuania), and yet they’re in the final – against a team that we ALSO beat home and away the last time we faced them in competitive matches.
Nothing that Croatia have achieved in Russia was beyond Scotland’s capabilities, had we only held on for that win at Hampden. Instead, we all know what happened next. But that single stupid, unnecessary pass is still one heck of a tiny margin of error to be beating ourselves up over.
In Scotland – and not just in football – we have a tendency to think we’re a lot worse than we actually are. It’s something that’s always worth keeping in mind when we berate ourselves for not being able to do stuff.
