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The Football Show · 7 October 2026
"We are not in the comfortable situation." After Scotland lost 2-1 to Slovenia at Hampden, PLZ Soccer asked Sebastien Pocognoli whether Scotland can still finish second in their Nations League group.
With two games left and Slovenia ahead in the race for second, Pocognoli says Scotland need six points from six and need Slovenia to drop points. He says "we have to improve everything": Scotland created plenty of chances in two of their four group games but fewer tonight, and defended with less quality. He believes there's enough quality in the squad, and says this camp was a chance to experiment with a lot of new young players.
Transcript:
Would you concede now that your position is that you're up against it, or not going to finish second? Would you concede that that's a difficult prospect for Scotland now, to finish second?
Yeah, I say when we start the Nations League, we want to be ambitious and combine as strong as possible the new principle, and to be strong in terms of the ranking. Still two games to go. Slovenia is now leading this second place, and yeah, we need to do a six on six and hope that Slovenia lose some points, but we are not in the comfortable situation to fight for this. So we just have to look to ourselves for the next camp and try to get the maximum of the points.
You're only in a short period of time, but where do you think your biggest problems lie as a manager, or problems to sort out? Is it the backline, or is it our inability to score goals?
We have to improve everything. I said this yesterday. I would not say that everything is perfect, I would not say that everything was bad, but we need to improve many things. I think we create many chances in two of the four games. Today was less. We defend less with quality. So this game has to be, for me, a consideration about what we need really to improve. And yeah, there's many things, but for me, yes, it's a different principle, different approach of the game, and we struggle in two games, so we have to improve.
Do you think there's enough quality to be able to change things when it's not going your way?
We have enough quality. Yeah, we have enough quality, but maybe we will need to adjust one or two things. We use this camp to experiment things, and we see what we see, and we will analyse what we need to analyse. We have a lot of new players, new young players, so it's part of the process to also see things that cannot work. But obviously there was also a lot of positive aspects during the four games.
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