Scots get rude awakening at U-20 World Cup

By: Ian Rose | July 1st, 2007

For the first time in 20 years, Scotland’s youth football program is in a major tournament, the Under-20 World Cup in Canada, and today, that international inexperience showed, as Scotland fell to a much more confident Japanese side, 3-1. Truth be told, the scoreline doesn’t quite tell the story. We were absolutely dominated. To come away from a drumming like this with only a -2 goal differential is a gift. Where to begin?

Scotland’s head coach, the legendary Archie Gemmill, started an unusual eleven for this match. The four defenders, Lowing, Cuthbert, Reynolds and Cave-Brown would frankly have not been my starters. Andy Considine has shown his ability at the SPL level beyond any of these lads, and I think he deserves a start. Hopefully, he’ll get it Wednesday against Nigeria. The two young Celtic midfielders on the squad, Mike McGlinchey and Ryan Conroy, were expected to start as well, and while Conroy played the whole match, McGlinchey never left the bench. The one player that did come off the bench and make his mark was Scotland’s one goal scorer, Ross Campbell of Hibernian.

The Japanese frankly demolished us. They outshot Scotland 17-7, and 9-2 on target. That doesn’t even capture the one-sidedness of it, since most of Scotland’s shots came at the end. The majority of the match was played right in front of poor Andy McNeil’s Scotland goal. To be honest, the kid will take a lot of hits for his play, but I don’t think he held up badly. His defense gave him very little support, and though 6 saves out of 9 isn’t great, he was under constant pressure and even an older, more experienced goalie would have had problems in his place.

Now, Scotland faces an uphill battle. Our next opponent is Nigeria, who plays their opening match against Costa Rica tonight. They were runners-up at the last U-20 World Cup, and will likely field another very strong side. We’ll see tonight how strong. Regardless, if we don’t make serious changes, Nigeria will absolutely run all over this Scotland side.

I have a few prescriptions for improving the side:
1. Start Considine in place of Andrew Cave-Brown. C-B has a yellow card anyway, and Considine deserves this chance.
2. Start both McGlinchey and Conroy. They know each other. They play together all the time. That’s a tough thing to come by in an international tournament, and we need some of that comfort level right now.
3. Goalkeeping. I’m going to be in the minority here, but I wouldn’t take out Andy McNeil. Frankly, regardless of this game, I think he’s better than Greg Kelly, his backup, and I think Scotland will be better off with him between the posts. This was not a fair way to judge any keeper’s talent.

That’s it. We need to play better in nearly every position and aspect of the game if we really hope to advance beyond this group. We knew Japan would be a good team, but I don’t think anyone expected them to walk over us the way they did. After a few days of shuffling the side and licking our wounds, Nigeria awaits, and they will not be any easier.