I wasn't for sacking him at the end of the last qualifiers. The stuff about us "not being good enough" is all fair enough but when you've got a squad of players at the level ours are at then you generally need other results to go for you, and that didn't happen at all in the last group. At one point it looked like we were going to take 4 points from Ireland, 4 from Poland, 6 from Gibraltar, beat Georgia at home and still not qualify. There's a fine line between success and failure in football (and that's particularly true in international football) so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I've changed my mind since then, though. The confident, threatening Scotland that we saw towards the end of the last World Cup campaign and away in Germany and Poland at the start of this campaign seems to have gone completely. The performances started to slide in the middle of the campaign and on the basis of our last couple of games it looks as though we're back to the Scotland we've seen for most of the last 20 years; the slow, pedestrian, clueless Scotland who look beaten before they even set foot on the pitch, who struggle to put a cohesive passing move together or even get a shot on target. We've taken one step forwards and one step backwards as far as I see it under Strachan. Back to square one.
Perhaps these performances could be excused by pointing out that we were playing some of the best in the world. You could say that we were playing motivated teams with something to play for, while our players were on their holidays. There's an element of truth in that, but the problem is that our decline in performances has mirrored Strachan's change in attitude over his tenure as manager. His optimism when he took over was reflected in the confident performances I mentioned earlier, now his pessimism, his moaning about not having the required resources appears to be having the opposite effect. That's a very difficult thing to turn around, especially when you have limited time with the players, as you do at international level.
Again, perhaps his point about not having the players required could be excused if he appeared to be taking steps to remedy this by bringing in the next generation of players. Instead he plays a 35 year old, clubless defender in a friendly.
He doesn't think the players we have are good enough to qualify for tournaments and he doesn't think the younger players are even worth bringing into the squad for a meaningless friendly. I genuinely don't understand why he even still wants the job.