Liechtenstein? Waste of Time

Tonight’s match away to Liechtenstein is so unimportant that I gave some consideration to just getting ChatGPT to write this for me. But then I realised that would be trying something new, and we don’t do that in relation to the national team apparently.

Friday night’s 3-1 defeat at home to Iceland was almost exactly everything that could possibly go wrong with that friendly. We had a quick injury to our goalkeeper, and had to throw in someone who’s played seven competitive matches in his life, and he wasn’t ready for it and had a stinker. A game probably arranged to give us a boost given we haven’t won a home friendly in nine years, a starting XI that’s recognisable as being one of our strongest, and we still lost. We learned nothing, and demoralised ourselves in the process.

Tonight, we can’t really do anything right. Win comfortably, and no one cares as we beat minnows. Play a second string XI and we learn nothing about how they might do against the better opposition we’ll have to face in World Cup qualifying. Win narrowly, and it’s rubbish. Don’t win, and we probably still won’t sack the manager as everyone knows he’s leaving after this next campaign anyway and the SFA will think it’s too late to make a change before the qualifiers anyway.

Our history doesn’t even allow us to think “ach it’s only Liechtenstein” either. We’ve played them only twice previously, and both those games came in the qualifying for Euro 2012. Those of us who were at the first of those two matches at Hampden will probably never forget the experience. When Mario Frick gave the visitors the lead right at the start of the second half, it was almost unbelievable. The lead seemed to last a lot longer than Kenny Miller’s equaliser just sixteen minutes later, probably because it took us until about five minutes before that to even register a shot on target. But what did last an eternity was the injury time at the end of the game. The Stephen McManus winner might be listed as happening in the 90th minute, but it’s etched into our memories as being the 97th minute and must be the one and only time I’ve not celebrated an injury time winner. It was far more a sigh of relief and a shake of the head.

If you think the second game that campaign couldn’t be as bad, you’d be right. It was still only a narrow 1-0 win, the goal coming from Craig Mackail-Smith around the half hour mark, so maybe don’t talk it up too much. It was our third and final win of an overall disappointing campaign which oddly also included a decent performance at home to Spain, even if the game did eventually end in defeat.

Liechtenstein have already started their qualifying campaign. Back in March they lost 3-0 at home to North Macedonia…

and then lost 2-0 at home to Kazakhstan. On Friday, they lost 3-0 away to Wales. Can’t find proper footage of these two, but here’s the third Wales goal.

That’s about as much as there is to say about this game. Apparently Liechtenstein defended really well on Friday, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if tonight’s 5pm oor time kick off ends in a goalless draw. It’s on BBC Two if you really want to put yourself through it. At least it will be done and dusted in time for the podcast recording tonight reflecting on the memories of Euro 2024 – expect it to be more about the fan experience than the football!

This lull really has lasted quite a long time now, hasn’t it?

Anyway, good luck to Scotland, I guess? If we need luck in this game we should probably chuck it.

With thanks to Jeff for much of the inspiration for the content of this blog. Who needs ChatGPT‽