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The latest depressing snapshot – for the greater good see alien concept – preceded the conclusion to a Scotland Euro 2020 section that will be met equally with sighs of relief and shrugs. The Scottish Professional Football League is resisting a call to postpone matches immediately before Steve Clarke guides his team into the March play-offs. Twenty-one years have passed since Scotland played in a finals; with attitudes like this, no wonder.

Kazakhstan’s visit to Hampden Park on Tuesday may just draw more than the official (and questionable) attendance of 20,699 who watched the recent dismissal of San Marino. This campaign frittered out long ago but has the curious subplot of Scotland being two wins away from clawing their way back towards relevance courtesy of the Nations League.

Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and John Brewin discuss England winning at a canter, Wales’s Hungarian shootout, Ireland’s Groundhog Day, debutants scoring goals and keepers hitting light fittings

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We take a look back at the weekend’s football, starting with England’s two Euro 2020 qualifying wins over Montenegro and Kosovo.

To these eyes, at least, it was not in a stadium that the saga of the England football team in the modern era reached its lowest point. It was not Kevin Keegan resigning in the Wembley washroom in 2000, or Steve McClaren watching helplessly from beneath an umbrella as Croatia denied his team a place in the Euro 2008 finals, or the stumbling capitulation to Iceland in Nice three years ago under Roy Hodgson. It came one afternoon in the middle of Fabio Capello’s four-year reign, in the very different surroundings of a Knightsbridge shopping street.

At the behest of the Football Association’s PR department, the notoriously aloof Capello had invited a large group of senior sports writers from national newspapers to lunch. This was a rare event, with the additional lure of the location: San Lorenzo, the famous Italian restaurant favoured by Princess Diana, Jack Nicholson, Joan Collins and other celebs whose presence ensured the entrance was habitually patrolled by paparazzi.

Broken records, Arsenal’s missing link from Austria and what Phil Neville could learn from Manchester United

The Women’s Football Weekend proved a brilliant milestone for the game, a week on from that record-breaking crowd at Wembley for the Lionesses. A combined attendance of more than 74,000 fans at six venues across the country, four of which were played at men’s stadiums, was a superb turnout, with more than 23,000 at Anfield and a record Women’s Super League crowd at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where 38,262 supporters watched the north London derby. Last weekend at Wembley was an emotional occasion, with around 70 former Lionesses – many of whom had never been to the national stadium – invited along. Participation figures in the women’s game have risen to 2.3 million this year, in line with the 50% growth the Football Association targeted by 2020 three years ago.

The teams meet for the sixth time in two years, with Ireland needing a win and Denmark a point to reach Euro 2020

“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” It was the premise of the 1993 cinema hit Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray played Phil Connors, a cynical, egotistical and misanthropic TV weatherman who finds himself reliving the same 24 hours over and over and over again while working on location in the hick town of Punxsutawney. More recently, the footballers of Denmark and the Republic of Ireland have found themselves trapped in a similarly nightmarish scenario, apparently destined to meet each other time after time in a never-ending series of mind-numbingly tedious football matches. After four draws and one emphatic Danish victory, Monday night’s will be their sixth competitive meeting in two years.

Although Ireland’s goalkeeper Darren Randolph and his teammate Shane Duffy deserve some sort of footballing medal of valour for being the only two players from either nation to have played every single minute of every single encounter, one can’t help but feel that it is Christian Eriksen who is deserving of our most heartfelt sympathies. He is better than this. Or at least was better than this, a relentlessly awful fixture that always seemed somehow beneath a man of his extraordinary talents, until it inevitably dragged him down to its level. Ireland have become the Ned Ryerson to his increasingly world weary weatherman; old “Needle Nose Ned the Head” being the relentlessly cheerful former schoolmate of Connors in Groundhog Day, whose overbearing small-town insurance salesman shtick eventually earns him a haymaker in the chops by way of a greeting.

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Hell hath no fury like a knobbly stick-waving, Riverdancing Irish relative whose national team has been cheated out of a place at a major football tournament and Monday marks the 10th anniversary of the famous night in Paris that sent The Fiver’s cousin, Theme Pub O’Fiver, over the abyss and into the madness. With O’Ireland level on aggregate with France in a play-off for the 2010 World Cup finals and deep into the first half of added time, the ball was crossed into their crowded penalty area, where Thierry Henry controlled it with his hand, spun it for a good 30 seconds on one finger Harlem Globetrotter-style, before sending a pinpoint wraparound pass into the path of William Gallas, who headed past Shay Given to score the winner.

Gareth Bale has said Wales’s attacking armoury is stronger than when they reached the Euro 2016 semi-finals and denied there is a burden on him to help his country to a third major tournament.

Bale played 60 minutes as Wales beat Azerbaijan 2-0 in Baku on Saturday and will start against Hungary in Cardiff on Tuesday, when victory would secure automatic passage to Euro 2020.

Michael Jolley’s foul-mouthed tirade towards local journalists played a part in him losing his job as Grimsby Town manager, director John Fenty has said.

The League Two side announced on Friday that Jolley had left the club by mutual consent following a seven-game winless run. Fenty, the club’s majority shareholder, has revealed that Jolley’s departure followed an expletive-laden rant at BBC Humberside reporters.

How much do you know about some of international football’s sharpest shooters?