Botch it up in North Macedonia and Sebastien Pocognoli won’t be in danger of losing his job. He won’t be subjected to calls for his head. He won’t be going anywhere.
What will come to pass, though, is the beginning of the slow creep of doom. Those first trundles of the snowball down the hill, destined to gather speed and force until somewhere, some time, its momentum becomes unstoppable. The foreseeable, inexorable journey towards having to admit defeat and start over again.
Doubts which may exist around the Belgian’s suitability for the job of head coach will be amplified. The buy-in he needs from everyone from dressing-room to cheap seats to make this a success will be loosened, weakened, jeopardised.
Holes will be picked in his tactics, his set-up, his team selection. His relative lack of experience will become a discussion point.
Put simply, the welcome sense of optimism that surrounded his appointment will fade markedly. The feel-good vibe will go. And when the feel-good vibe goes, especially so early in a manager’s reign, that spells trouble. Trouble which, more often than not, ends in the tin tack not that far down the line.
For any Scotland boss to be successful, he needs Hampden and the Tartan Army energised and loud. He needs the nation behind him. The sense of resignation around the national stadium during the second half of his first home fixture – the 3-0 reverse to Switzerland in midweek – did not augur well.
Sebastien Pocognoli watches his Scotland side train at Hampden ahead of their flight to Skopje
Sure, Pocognoli needs to be given a chance. We all recognise he has a job on his hands in changing the identity of the Scotland national team into something more forceful and front-foot while doing so with new personnel in some key positions.
Patience can only go so far, though. And that’s why Saturday night’s Nations League fixture in Skopje is so important for the 39-year-old.
This North Macedonia side are rancid. Their recent results spell it out in technicolour. They’ve scored once in six games dating back to last November, and that goal came in a 7-1 hammering from Wales in Cardiff. They’ve gone ten games without a win. Their head coach Goce Sedloski is under pressure to resign.
Yes, they did manage to dig out a goalless draw in Ghent against Belgium a year ago in a World Cup qualifier, but they didn’t manage a shot on target – with Red Devils boss Rudi Garcia admitting afterwards that his side could easily have played without Thibaut Courtois in goal. Not beating them is not an option.
Pocognoli, it should be stated here, still has the people on his side. Despite a grim first 45, we saw green shoots after the interval in last weekend’s goalless draw in Slovenia. We accept that seeing Jack Hendry red-carded on 11 minutes sent the game plan up in smoke against the Swiss – even though what followed was largely uninspiring.
That goodwill will evaporate should things go belly-up in the Balkans, though.
You see, Pocognoli has hardly inherited a team at rock-bottom. This is a Scotland set-up that has qualified for three of the last four major finals. It’s a set-up trying to figure out a way under a different type of coach to make a serious impression at that level.
George Burley can’t bear to look as his Scotland side fall to defeat in North Macedonia
It possesses high-grade players such as a Champions League-winning captain, title-winning midfielders from Napoli, the skipper of Aston Villa. A huge chunk of the squad is employed by sides in the top five leagues.
Switching up the formation or not, they should be taking apart a North Macedonia side sitting 28 places below them in the FIFA rankings in 70th.
There can be no excuses. Pocognoli needs to buy himself time by beating this lot. Otherwise, he’s on the slippery slope. Call that knee-jerk. Call it what you want. It’s just football. We’ve seen it with the national team before. In this very city.
How good life seemed in the delightful environs of Skopje in September 2008 before the first competitive game of George Burley’s reign.
It is a pleasure even now to let the mind drift back to an open-air concert in the ancient Roman theatre on the Scupi archaeological site just out of town – and the great generosity of the locals there – whilst looking at the pen-and-ink sketch of the old stone bridge crossing the River Vardar still up on the office wall after all this time.
Scorchio, it was too. A joy. Until the game started, of course. Scotland had only turned up in town a matter of hours before the kick-off, a quite catastrophic bit of planning, and wilted in the heat.
They were a goal down in five minutes. Craig Gordon had to make a couple of other saves in what ended a 1-0 defeat.
Rather like Pocognoli, national boss Burley, appointed after Alex McLeish’s defection to Birmingham City, had got off to a pretty humdrum start. A draw in a friendly with Croatia had been followed by a loss to the Czech Republic and a grim stalemate at home to Northern Ireland.
Switzerland’s Nico Elvedi turns away to celebrate after doubling the visitors’ lead at Hampden
This was the evening it became abundantly clear, though, that he wasn’t cut out for the job at hand. Burley didn’t change things up in Skopje until it was too late. He struck a passive figure in the dugout.
Hearing him state afterwards that he thought the second half display was ‘outstanding’ and rattling on about being denied a penalty was enough. The die was cast.
Of course, it would be November 2009 before he lost his job, a 3-0 friendly hammering in Wales the straw that broke the camel’s back in the wake of a failure to make it to the World Cup and the nonsense of ‘Boozegate’, but it had been a long time coming.
Even after Skopje, the knives were out. Gary Caldwell, then a fixture at centre-back, branded the judgments made on Burley and his team ‘embarrassing’. Former national coach Walter Smith went even further by talking about how he was picking up on criticism of the former Hearts manager before the squad had even set foot on the plane to Macedonia.
‘I just think that, sometimes, the levels of criticism that appear can affect the team as much as anything else,’ ventured Smith. And that’s as true now as it was then.
It’s also why Pocognoli has to win in North Macedonia. He can’t let outright negativity take over the narrative – and it will, deservedly, should he fail there – and take him into a tailspin.
That he wants Scotland to be more aggressive and wants to get more out of the likes of Billy Gilmour is great and laudable, but he’s facing valid questions too.
He seems wedded to three at the back, but does that suit the personnel at his disposal? We are not blessed with top-level central defenders, after all. Three at the back also makes it harder to see where Ben Gannon-Doak, pretty much the only player with genuine pace, fits in.
Pocognoli drills his team on the game plan ahead of what he hopes will be hist first victory
God, we need a goal from someone too. Ideally, a forward. Fail to score in the first 25 minutes and this will be the longest Scotland have gone without finding the net ever.
One of the new boys surely has to take their chance before Che Adams is fit again or we go back to phoning Lyndon Dykes.
Oli McBurnie has worked hard. Robbie Ure has been OK. Kieron Bowie deserves another shot at starting after being taken off following Hendry’s silliness against the Swiss. All three, though, have squandered real chances in the past two games.
Pocognoli needs these guys to grasp the thistle. He also needs to get out of Skopje without being followed by the kind of toxic cloud that accompanied Burley all the way from the banks of the Vardar to his eventual, unavoidable demise.
It’s a massive night for him. He will be excused further slip-ups on the road to Euro 2028. He will be forgiven defeats to better opposition as long as the end destination remains in sight.
He just can’t foul up here. Pocognoli’s remit is to take Scotland to the knockout stages of major competitions. Failing to see off a North Macedonia outfit as bad as this would see confidence in him fall off a cliff – and there’s no coming back from that.
Rodgers v Desmond beat Fury v Joshua
As we wait patiently for Martin O’Neill to let us know whether he has finished considering his future at the ripe old age of 74 and decided to carry on as Celtic manager, the news his predecessor Brendan Rodgers is returning to Glasgow has proved a merry diversion.
Brendan Rodgers will be a popular turn as fans clamour to hear his take on his Celtic exit
Tickets sold out in jig-time yesterday morning for an audience with the Brodge, arranged in conjunction with a fan podcast regularly critical of the current board, at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall next June.
Should that event take place against the backdrop of an unsuccessful season for the Parkhead outfit – and that’s where the clever money is heading right now in the wake of two abject Old Firm defeats – it carries the prospect of causing proper ructions. Which is surely what the organisers are secretly hoping for.
It’s certainly shaping up to be some wheeze. Rodgers has kept his powder dry since being lacerated by major shareholder Dermot Desmond on Celtic’s official club website after leaving last October.
It’s unthinkable that he won’t exercise his right to reply in front of an expectant crowd, though. Unthinkable he won’t offer his views on the mismanagement of countless transfer windows that has made the club a laughing stock in Europe.
Rodgers, for all his faults, is accomplished at saying what he wants to say when he wants to say it and he’ll probably be fine-tuning his routine even now.
Of course, there were rumours rattling around recently about him trying to get involved in buying into the club. Fanciful as that seems, people do talk about him feeling that he has some kind of unfinished business at Celtic.
Whether he is to ride in from Saudi on his trusty steed, scabbard in hand and vowing to lead the revolution, or just turn up for a bit of rabble-rousing, it will be quite something to see.
If the organisers have their wits about them, they’ll set up a pay-per-view stream.
For those of us who like this sort of thing, Rodgers v Desmond knocks Fury v Joshua into a cocked hat any day of the week.
How DID Strachan survive McGhee farce at Dundee?
Rather like wallowing in an old episode of Only Fools And Horses, what fun it was this week to be taken back to the comedy turn that was Mark McGhee’s three-month stint as Dundee boss in 2022.
Gordon Strachan has been technical director at Dundee for seven years, but questions remain
Paul McGowan was talking about it on the Open Goal podcast. His description of the season, which ended in relegation, as a ‘shambles’ cannot be argued with. His review of McGhee’s time as ‘madness’ was surely an understatement in the extreme.
McGhee, then 65, became known for increasingly erratic interviews in which he vowed to ‘go naked for a week’ if they beat St Johnstone and talked about sitting in his flat with the heating off and going on a strict diet to let him feel he had ‘given everything’.
‘I got to the point where I am wondering: “What the f***’s going on here”,’ reflected McGowan, in addition to alleging it was McGhee’s assistant Simon Rusk who did all the work and that James McPake would have got more out of the players if he hadn’t been sacked.
McGhee said at the time it was Lesley Strachan who gave him that diet. It was her husband Gordon, in his role as technical director at Dens, who batted for his big pal to get the job in the first place.
It does make you wonder about Dundee that Strachan, still in position, came through that whole insane journey unscathed, no questions asked.
To pinch the title of a famous Fools and Horses episode, it really was a Jolly Boys’ Outing. And every bit as farcical as anything Del Boy or Rodders dished up.
