Sebastien Pocognoli waited months for his first home match in charge of Scotland. It lasted eleven minutes before it became a different game entirely. Jack Hendry was sent off, Ricardo Rodriguez scored from the resulting set-piece a minute later, and Hampden spent the remaining hour and a quarter watching a team of ten try to find a goal it has not been able to find since June.
Switzerland won 3-0 and did not have to be especially good to do it.
Eleven minutes that decided everything
Hendry went off as the last man. The red card came on eleven minutes and Rodriguez struck on twelve, which gave Scotland no interval at all between losing a defender and losing the lead they never had. Pocognoli had spoken before the match about wanting to take control of the game at home. That plan died before the first drinks break.
Half-time arrived at 0-1, which by then counted as damage limitation. Ten minutes into the second half Nico Elvedi made it two, set up by Dan Ndoye. Ndoye supplied again on 82 minutes, this time for Zeki Amdouni, who had already scored twice and set up the other in Switzerland's 3-0 win over North Macedonia on Saturday.
Four games without a goal
The scoring drought is the number that will follow Scotland out of Glasgow. They failed to score against Morocco and Brazil at the World Cup, drew 0-0 in Slovenia in Pocognoli's first match, and have now been blanked at Hampden. That is four consecutive internationals without a goal. Scotland last managed that between February and May 1971.
Pocognoli had been asked about exactly this before kick-off and had waved it away. "I don't think there's any concerns from my side to score goals because we have good strikers," he said. "Let's say we score tomorrow, I hope, and we can open another topic." They did not, and the topic is still open.
Oli McBurnie led the line and remains without a goal in seventeen Scotland appearances. Billy Gilmour and Lewis Ferguson both started in midfield, the partnership Ferguson had talked up in the build-up, but a ten-man side chasing a two-goal deficit is not the setting in which a midfield pairing gets judged fairly.
The squad was already thin
Scott McTominay missed the match while recovering from a minor heart procedure. Lawrence Shankland and Che Adams were injured. Kieran Tierney and Kenny McLean withdrew late. Against a Switzerland side ranked 28 places above Scotland and beaten only once in their last ten games — the extra-time World Cup quarter-final defeat by Argentina — that was already a difficult evening before the sending-off made it an impossible one.
Switzerland, for their part, did this without Granit Xhaka and Breel Embolo, neither of whom is involved in this run of fixtures. Murat Yakin had missed the pre-match media conference with hearing problems the Swiss FA attributed to the flight over. None of it mattered.
Match facts: Scotland 0-3 Switzerland, Uefa Nations League, League B, Group 1, Barclays Hampden, Glasgow, Tuesday 29 September 2026. Goals: Ricardo Rodriguez 12, Nico Elvedi 55 (assist Dan Ndoye), Zeki Amdouni 82 (assist Dan Ndoye). Red card: Jack Hendry (Scotland) 11. Half-time 0-1. Scotland XI: Gunn; Patterson, Binks, McKenna, Hendry, Robertson; Gilmour, Ferguson, McGinn; Bowie, McBurnie. Scotland have now failed to score in four consecutive internationals, matching a run last seen between February and May 1971. Oli McBurnie is without a goal in 17 Scotland appearances.
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