5:1

None of the Scottish team would get into the England squad, so what would be the point?

Exactly.

A British team and an England team would be virtually the same 11 players, all you'd have achieved would be preventing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish players playing International football, which they can do at present. Hence why the Scottish, Welsh and Irish FA's wouldn't entertain such an idea, and nor would their regional Governments.

Blame organisations such as UEFA and FIFA for expanding the final stages of tournaments to enable nations that never could, or no longer can, in the case of Scotland, play football to a decent standard.

There are intriguing anomalies across sport in the British Isles.

For instance, it looks like the Irish rugby team and the Irish cricket team are drawn from all Ireland; the four UK nations compete separately in the Commonwealth Games, but as the UK (Team GB) in the Olympics; England and Wales play cricket as one team while Scotland formed its own team about 30 years ago.

In general, it is not worth getting into a tizz over, in my view - but I can understand why so many other countries find it objectionable. Would we be happy if other countries were allowed to enter 4 different football teams from different areas of those countries into international competition but we were not, for example? The fact that we are allowed to do that is partly due to the historic role that the individual home nations played in the formation and development of Association Football and partly due to the fact that, strictly speaking as I understand it, national teams represent football associations not countries or territories - and we have 4 national associations in the UK. 

I think that it was and is worth getting into a bit of a tizz over the cricket situation. To call a team that represents England and Wales, and which previously represented England, Wales and Scotland until around 30 years ago, ‘’England’’ is inappropriate and smacks of arrogance. 

As a rugby fan, I am very concerned with the serious deterioration of rugby union as a participation sport across Scotland. 20 years ago, when I was secretary of my wee local club, I knew something was going wrong in that area. While I could look at our club’s honour board and see captains of the first, second and third teams from 20 years earlier listed, by then we were regularly struggling to pull together a first 15 and had abandoned any ambition of a seconds, nevermind thirds, team. From discussion with my counterparts in our league set up, I know that what we were experiencing then was typical of what was going on across much of Scotland. Fast forward 20 years and this phenomenon has worked its way up to some very long established and prestigious clubs, with reports now appearing of some of them winding up or considering winding up in the near future. Taking away the strong link between grass roots rugby in Scotland and the Scotland national team would, I believe, be catastrophic to the uptake and playing of rugby in Scotland. Scotland already has, by far, the smallest number of registered and active rugby players amongst all of the tier 1 nations (hence our heavy reliance upon players sourced from outside of Scotland in our national squad) and doing away with a Scottish national team in favour of a UK team would probably prove to be a fatal blow to the sport up here.