What Scotland's Saying

Morning edition

The World Cup qualifies as hope, but it arrives this morning with small anxieties attached. Angus Gunn's limited appearances for Nottingham Forest have generated real concern about whether he can hold his international place, and the consensus forming is that a goalkeeper who does not play cannot simply be trusted on reputation. The question of match sharpness is not a minor one.

Findlay Curtis has drawn enough attention to be considered a genuine option from the start against Haiti, which would represent something. Meanwhile, a voice from the 1986 squad has observed, with the particular authority of experience, that Scotland's attacking options now compare unfavourably with generations that still found major tournaments beyond them. It is a specific kind of discouragement.

Both Old Firm clubs have been passed over by BK Hacken's Andersen, who has opted for Sporting Lisbon. Neither club appears to have been the runner-up so much as the alternative that was considered and declined.

The domestic news cycle is carrying SNP tax policy and a decision against opening a new police investigation, two stories that tend to travel together without resolving.

In Dumfries, a £56 million school has opened on the site of a building considered unfit for use for more than five years. The children who will study there were in primary school when the old one was already past saving.

Scotland this morning is not anxious so much as watchful — attending carefully to things that may or may not come good.