Scotland hosted Canada in an international friendly and are you still reading this? Less than 6,000 Scots even bothered to show up, their lowest home crowd since 1902. But the ESPN3 stream of Germany vs. England was down and for twenty minutes the only option was to watch the greatest shit on a stick match ever conceived transpire at Easter Road in Edinburgh.
There was absolutely nothing that wasn’t shitty about this game. The crowd? Historically bad. The weather? Crap — cloudy, windy, wet, freezing. The pitch? Metaphorical cowplop. The teams? animated feces.
Here was Canada, already eliminated from 2018 World Cup contention, fielding a starting XI with an average age of 25.27 (yes, I crunched the numbers) but with only 8 international goals between them. They weren’t even going with youth, just a tried and true method of meadow muffins.
Scotland were even worse. They haven’t been to a World Cup since 1998 and it’s not looking good for them in qualifying. They’re behind England, Slovenia, Slovakia and Lithuania in Group F, but their starting XI was aged 29.18. Why? Are there any youth players left in Scotland or is it just this crop until their death and the rise eSports?
The announcers on ESPN3 announced that instant replays wouldn’t be available throughout the telecast, and everyone agreed that this was for the best, although both first half goals are worth watching. They are, as art critic Robert Coates would say, “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless.”
They're both gloriously bad.
This was a match where you watched passing, possession and interplay for 90 minutes and thought, “Well, that’s definitely not the way to go about playing this game.”
There is no remedy for this, there is no cure for Scottish or Canadian football. These sides make you question whether all the money spent on youth development wouldn’t have been better spent purchasing rags, petrol and matches and burning anything football related to the ground.
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