LIKE many people, I have to admit I didn’t know a huge amount about women’s football ahead of these European Championships. If there was an article about it in a magazine or a newspaper I would usually just skip past it. I was quite ignorant about it all. You get caught up in covering the men’s game that you don’t really pay as much attention to other things happening in the sport.

Then the BBC asked me to come over to Holland to cover it once Scotland had qualified and my eyes have been opened. I spent a lot of time in advance doing my research about the team, the manager, and the opposition, and taking in a few of their warm-up matches on home soil, too.

And now I have been here for the last 10 days or so, following Scotland, doing co-commentary on the radio for their three games, and just being immersed in it all. And it’s given me a real insight into the women’s game that I didn’t have before. I know the Scottish players a lot better than I did before, their style of play, their strengths and weaknesses and all the rest.

I’ve been to watch their training sessions about seven or eight times and it’s a really high standard. Only a handful of the Scots girls aren’t with full-time clubs and far better ones than many of their male counterparts; Liverpool, Man City and major clubs on the Continent too.

The results over here haven’t gone as Scotland wouldn’t have liked and, just as their male counterparts tended to do back when they used to qualify for things, they are heading home after the group stage. But I’ve been hugely impressed by many aspects of their game. Most of the players are tremendously technically gifted and that makes the matches really entertaining. It isn’t as physical as the men’s game – which is to be expected – while Scotland’s downfall in their matches has been some fairly wretched defending. That has really cost them.

In the first game they lost 6-0 to England who, it must be said, are a far better side but Scotland gifted them every one of those goals. If you were to go back and analyse it properly then you would have to say that some of the defending was really amateurish. They then really had to beat Portugal in the second match and were on top for large periods at a time. But a complete miskick by a defender fell kindly to one of their strikers and she tucked it away.

The second goal was a similar idea, a ball over the top and the striker was straight through. So they’ve largely been the architects of their own downfall over the past week or so. They’ll be disappointed with the results  given the hype and extra attention they got before they came out here and they won’t want that just to peter away after all the hard work they’ve put in to try to raise the profile of the game.

On the plus side Erin Cuthbert now has the proud record of scoring the first-ever goal for the Scottish women’s team in a major tournament with her consolation against Portugal. The Chelsea player is one of the youngest in the squad and has been an absolute stand-out during her time on the pitch. It’s a name I think we’re going to hear a lot of over the next decade or so in the Scottish women’s game.

Anna Signeul has now signed off as manager after 12 years and you have to say she has really left her mark. She has helped develop the women’s game from academy level all the way up. There are now something like 12,000 girls playing football in Scotland, a sum that has doubled in the past five years. In a population of around 5million, that still isn’t that many and hopefully they can get that number up in the coming years.

Shelley Kerr will take over from Anna and looks another excellent appointment given her pedigree and background so hopefully she can help take the women’s game to the next level, both at senior level and at grassroots, too. I just hope that, despite two disappointing results, that just seeing Scotland play at a major international event like this will get more girls kicking a ball about and maybe even asking to join their local club.

I’m heading back home today but I definitely plan on continuing to follow the team’s progress. Their next challenge is to make the World Cup in France in 2019 and hopefully they will do that. I’ll be watching closely.