I'll be honest, I was on a complete downer about Scottish football after the results tonight, and the Shamrock result at first made me wonder how far we had fallen. But then when I just looked 5 minutes agoat the teams that got pumped out tonight, it actually doesn't seem as bad as I first thought. It looks like several "bigger" clubs completely misjudgded the level of competition they were up against, and not just us. Look at the teams that got huckled out of europe tonight: Celtic Rangers Hearts Rosenborg Bursaspor Dinamo Bucharest Dnipro Panathinaikos Partizan Belgrade Roma Sevilla Sochaux Spartak Moscow Sparta Prague Now how many of those sides play to at least 40,000 every week, spend more than us every year on transfers (and some of those by 40-50 million more), and yet we seem to expect success every time we play in Europe. Are our expectations wrong? Or are we really better than these sorts of sides?
we should be beating the likes of sion every day of the week. same witht he huns, they should be skelping maribor.
But what makes us think we should? Past glories? Size of our stadiums? Size of fanbase? All of those mean **** all when it comes to the actual match, as the likes of Sevilla and Roma have also just found out. Is it not just ignorance that we slate our national side's ability, then complain when we don't beat clubs from the nations that regularly skelp ours?
we should be beating the likes of sion cos they are pish, nothing to do with past glories. I admit we are a long way from competing in europe against decent teams but against ****e like this it should not be a problem.
the problem is that our teams go out early consistently , and appear to be on a downward spiral ; not so sure the same could be said of those teams - or leagues - you mention.
Yes we are that bad. All the evidence points to it. Since Manchester 2008, Rangers have won 1 game in 22 ties. They've been pumped out the first qualifying rounds on 3 occasions, and had the worst performance by any scottish team in the CL group stage ever. Celtic have won only 5 games in 16 games and, as we know, been put of the first qualifying round for EL/CL 3 consecutive times. The others haven't come close to qualifying for the Europa league in any of those three seasons and have suffered more than a few skelpings/embarassments along the way. What more evidence do you need?
Give him his due, Walter Smith realised how ****e his team and the rest of Scottish football was. That's why he set his team up so defensively so as not to lose.
The problem you've got is that small Eastern European countries are improving all the time. Their own players are good technically, and they import half-decent Brazilians and Africans. You're regarded as "favourites" in these games because your history and fanbase is bigger, and not because your players are any better.
Can't comment on the Celtic game as I didn't see it, but Rangers were far better than Maribor and should have pumped them. Maribor scored with just about their only serious shot in the game and Rangers squandered a number of decent chances. I'd be more concerned if we were outplayed, but we weren't.
