Following on from chat in the World Cup threat about comparing squads, and the difficulty of doing so for Scotland given we dinnae have a WC squad for some reason.
I had a wee bit of free time this afternoon, so, exciting individual that I am, I collated the Scotland squads used over the last WC qualifiers as a starting point for comparison instead (in the sun, with a beer, for half an hour, I hasten to add). I then went away and did something more interesting that had nothing to do with football.
There were 42 callups in total across the 10 games, but we can narrow that down to a comparable 23-man squad on order of priority of squad callups > appearances > 1st team appearances > sub appearances, which gives us:
23-man WC Qualifier "squad"
PLAYER NAME CALLUPS / PLAYED start (sub)
Craig Gordon 10 / 7 (0)
Christophe Berra 10 / 6 (0)
James Forrest 10 / 5 (2)
Chris Martin 10 / 3 (5)
Ikechi Anya 10 / 2 (5)
Andrew Robertson 9 / 8 (0)
Leigh Griffiths 9 / 7 (2)
Robert Snodgrass 9 / 6 (1)
Barry Bannan 9 / 5 (0)
James Morrison 9 / 4 (1)
Kieran Tierney 8 / 7 (0)
Darren Fletcher 8 / 6 (0)
James McArthur 8 / 4 (4)
Grant Hanley 8 / 4 (1)
Russell Martin 7 / 4 (0)
Matt Ritchie 7 / 3 (2)
John Mcginn 7 / 0 (2)
Charles Mulgrew 6 / 6 (0)
Steven Fletcher 6 / 1 (2)
Steven Naismith 6 / 0 (1)
Jack Hamilton 1 6 / 0 (0)
Scott Brown 5 / 5 (0)
David Marshall 5 / 3 (0)
19 further callups that didn't make the cut
Allan McGregor 5 / 0 (0)
Stuart Armstrong 4 / 4 (0)
Matthew Phillips 4 / 4 (0)
Callum Paterson 4 / 3 (1)
Ryan Fraser 4 / 0 (1)
Jordan Archer 4 / 0 (0)
Oliver Burke 3 / 2 (0)
Lee Wallace 3 / 1 (0)
Shaun Maloney 2 / 0 (0)
Tom Cairney 2 / 0 (0)
Steven Whittaker 2 / 0 (0)
Liam Cooper 2 / 0 (0)
Callum McGregor 2 / 0 (0)
Gordon Greer 1 / 0 (0)
Alan Hutton 1 / 0 (0)
Barrie Mckay 1 / 0 (0)
Stephen Kingsley 1 / 0 (0)
Jordan Rhodes 1 / 0 (0)
Mark Reynolds 1 / 0 (0)
The image below gives the data in chronological order - interesting to see how callups shifted (or didn't) across the games.
Onywye, feel free to use this as a starting point for comparing with the other nations.