There is a mechanism in Scottish football that predates every current player in this squad and will outlast this tournament. It operates as follows: Scotland selects one figure to carry the accumulated weight of national expectation, loads that figure until the expectation and the person become structurally fused, and then, when the tournament applies pressure, finds it cannot assess the player without also assessing the hope. At that point, honest analysis becomes very difficult, because criticising the performance feels like dismantling something that was holding the whole structure up.
Scott McTominay arrived in the United States as the most legible narrative Scotland possessed. The Serie A season. Napoli. The goals. These were not invented — the record exists. What Scotland did with that record was convert it into a designated load-bearing wall, and the question now forming in domestic football discourse, following a 1-0 loss to Morocco in which Scotland managed 22% possession in the first half, is whether the wall is holding.
This is the wrong question, or rather, it is two questions that have been pressed together until their edges fused.
The first question is tactical and bounded: what has McTominay been able to do across two matches, against Haiti and against a Morocco side that controlled the Boston game from the 71st second onwards, and does that output match what the coaching staff require from that position? This question has an answer, and the answer can be found in the data.
The second question is psychological and structural: did Scotland's pre-tournament construction of McTominay as singular vessel create conditions in which fair assessment is now functionally impossible? This question also has an answer, but it is an answer about Scotland's habit of mind, not about McTominay's performances.
The precedent is well-established. Kenny Dalglish carried a version of this weight into the 1978 tournament in Argentina. Jim Baxter carried a different version of it for years before and after 1967. In each case, the mechanism was the same: a player of genuine quality, real and documented, became the nominated container for something much larger than any individual performance could either fulfil or disprove. The tournament then measured itself against the container rather than against the available evidence, and the analysis suffered accordingly.
Scotland now face Brazil on 24 June in Miami with one point from two matches. The margin for error is measurable and small. McTominay's role in whatever comes next will be subject to assessment, as it should be. The precondition for that assessment being useful is that it concerns what McTominay has done and what the match requires — not what was stored in his name before a ball was kicked.
The mechanism is not inevitable. It is a habit. Habits can be interrupted. The interruption requires only that the two questions be kept separate, which is harder than it sounds, and which Scotland has historically found very difficult to do.