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New coach, new players, but same old failings hamper Scotland - Published Scotland fans came to Hampden to welcome the new man, Sebastien Pocognoli, and left with all the woes of old weighing them down as they went. More calamitous defending in the beginning, another self-inflicted wound that was a complete game-changer, another day without a goal - four in a row now. In the early minutes when Jack Hendry got himself sent off, we may as well have been back amid the meltdown of Miami. Then, Scotland gifted Brazil one goal and then two when they made a fiendishly-difficult job an impossible one on the back of slapstick in defence. So it was again on Tuesday. Hendry's red card was a grim moment that sucked the life out of the occasion. Switzerland don't lose many games. Argentina had the devil's own job in seeing them off in extra-time at the World Cup. Germany beat them 4-3 in a friendly, the winner only coming in the 85th minute. They're full of nous and strength and belief. Their coach, Murat Yakin, has the calm authority of a man who knows, with absolute certainty, that his team will prevail. Once the opening goal went in, Yakin turned around in his technical area with a half-smile on his face. Job done, already. There was little Scotland could do about the brilliant way the Swiss cut them open to send Dan Ndoye away so early in the game, but there was plenty Hendry could have done - or should not have done - when he was at the heart of a foot-rush and a mismatch. Watching it unfold was painful. Ndoye was always winning the race. An experienced defender, Hendry knew that. He also would have known that any desperate and ill-fated attempt to halt Ndoye was only going to end one way. He was in no position to make a legitimate challenge. He needed to accept his fate and hope against hope that his goalkeeper was going to save him. Of the unpleasant options, he picked the one he could not pick. Reaching out to grab Ndoye was a fatal act. Later, captain Andy Robertson tried to explain what might have been going through Hendry's head, saying that it is anathema to a defender to just allow a striker a shot on goal, that every fibre of their being tells them to do something to stop it. Hindsight is lovely, he said. "Football is about split-second decisions ... but the red card killed us." Off Hendry went, in went the free-kick, and Scotland were a goal behind and a man down against the 14th best team in the world. Could Angus Gunn have done better with Ricardo Rodriguez's effort? Yes, it flew in on the goalkeeper's side of the wall and he didn't lay a glove on it. A nightmarish beginning. Hendry's night ended woefully early and so did Kieron Bowie's, the striker substituted in the wake of the red, an innocent victim of a dreadful error. Scotland worked like dervishes in the aftermath. They fought and scraped. John McGinn bought a bunch of fouls; Oli McBurnie battled hard in what McGinn called a "thankless task"; there were some fleeting moments when the crowd got energised and hope, or perhaps delusion, took hold. Pocognoli's underdogs tried to stay in the game, but there was an inevitability about it all. Switzerland dealt handily with Scotland's enthusiasm and waited to land the knockout blows, which came later on. A second goal didn't flatter them. Neither did a third. This was always going to be a huge ask when it was 11 v 11. When it became 10 v 11 in 11 minutes, the night was effectively over. That's the galling thing. Maybe it would have ended the same way if the red had never happened, but we never got the chance to find out. Is North Macedonia now must-win? Pocognoli said that everybody in the squad was "so excited to start the first page of the book at home", but the book turned into a horror story. The next chapter comes in Skopje on Saturday. You hesitate to call it a must-win so soon in Pocognoli's reign, but for feel-good purposes it really is. North Macedonia are no Switzerland, who beat them 3-0 last weekend. They're not even at Slovenia's level, having lost 2-0 to them on Tuesday. They are winless in 10 games, have scored two goals in that time and shipped four against Turkey, four against Denmark and seven against Wales. This is a game when the Scotland goal drought needs to end and the run of games without a win needs to be brought to be an abrupt conclusion. What Pocognoli does with his line-up and formation will be debated heavily because the 90 minutes against Switzerland really told us nothing. Or almost nothing. Luis Binks defended well on his debut and Stephen Welsh came on after the red card and performed admirably again. Plus marks on an otherwise non-entity of a night. Bowie was robbed of his evening and will surely be given a proper chance in Skopje. That McBurnie-Bowie combination deserves an opportunity to prove its worth having been broken up so prematurely at Hampden. Needing goals and pace and unpredictability, the manager might see this as a time for Ben Gannon-Doak, a tough customer to get into his system, but a speedster who is worth the effort in figuring out how to do it. You could see the logic of him not playing wing-back against the accomplished Swiss, but no such threat exists against North Macedonia. Not scoring against Slovenia was annoying; not scoring against Switzerland - in the circumstances - was understandable; not scoring and winning in Skopje would be a horrible outcome. Time to cut loose - or what constitutes cutting loose for a team that has lost their ability to score. The Scott McTominay overhead kick, the Kieran Tierney wonder goal, the Kenny McLean shot from the other end of the world seem like an awfully long time ago now. You pine for an ugly deflection, a madcap own goal, one that ricochets in off McGinn's backside or the back of McBurnie's head. Anything for a goal and a win. Anything. Get in touch Send your views on the Scotland football team
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