Learning on the job By Donald C Stewart

Date: 2nd October 2026

Learning on the job

By Donald C Stewart

A sketchy and humorous look at the outpourings of the great, the good and the not so good of Scottish fitba’ by Donald C Stewart. Readers are warned that if they take this seriously then therapy is available – just let us know where you find it so we can pass it on to others…

Two games in, how we liking the new era?

Sebastian Pocognoli has been put in front of a couple of teams in The Nations’ League and has had his new ideas tested. So far… second half wizardry, followed by third time doing the daft early loss of a goal moment and then everything goes out the window till we find the kitchen sink.

But on the run up to the game against Slovenia, Tottenham Hotspur’s new man, left-back and Scotland captain, Andy Robertson, suggested that it would be a learning curve for the players but one that they would learn on the job.

It led me to wonder whether or not there were other people out there currently learning on the job.

Is it fair to say that Prime Minister Andy Burnham has come in to learn on the job? One wonders just exactly how well he is doing, but plenty already have formed an opinion.

As Glasgow City Council are beginning to work out whether or not they should fire and rehire 23,000 staff with a new council leader, does that mean that he has been learning on the job? Will he be fired and rehired as part of the learning process?

The Royal College of Nursing are defending themselves against Sandy Peggie and the legal support that they either gave or didn’t give or should have given or ought to have offered or would have been in a position to agree to… Have they been learning on the job just how difficult it is to get through the quagmire that is the current state of our legal processes on gender equalities?

Or with not one, not two, but three government ministers in front of various Holyrood committees recently who made blunders suggesting that they didn’t know the very basics of their job, it is clear that they are not learning on the job…

Perhaps they all need to take a leaf out of OpenAI. One of the most successful examples of learning on the job was OpenAI who had bots meddling with multiple US government agency sites and then apparently managed to hack into the Australian Health Service! They worryingly know how to learn on the job as they developed an ability to smash through security like they were Oceans’ AI.

Or should people take a leaf out of the book of GrumpyGran1948, who is the world’s oldest female Fortnite streamer, with an audience of more than 24,000 followers? Introduced to the game by her grandson, who was 17 at the time, she has gone on to be recognised by the Guinness World Records in 2027 as the oldest gamer in town.

I was going to suggest that Donald Trump was perhaps also learning on the job, but there are some people who suggested that that would be stretching the word learning.

And so, as we are two games in, what do we think? Is this a new era that is worth celebrating, or are we beginning to feel that perhaps Pocognoli flatters to achieve? Some wit even likened him to Wilfried Nancy – surely not…

Or was the Steve Clarke era all that we thought it wasn’t?

Is the best we can hope for is getting into tournaments but not getting out the group stages?

Who’s to know?

We can take some comfort from the fact that Cape Verde and others punch above their weight. We always hope that we are also able to at some point, so if learning on the job has meant that we are showing improvements game on game perhaps by the time we get to game four, we shall be close to being world beaters…

Let’s be honest we’ll probably believe we are anyways…

---

Posted in: Fan's Blog, Latest News

Tags: oor Donald, Scottish fans, Scottish football, Tartan Army