a group of people brought together in a hurry in order to play together on a particular occasion

He knew that any shortcomings of what was essentially a scratch side would be exposed by the opposition.

It wasn't a bad performance for a scratch team.

We had to quickly put together a scratch team, which wasn't easy.

They did pretty well for a scratch side.

She used a scratch orchestra of complete amateurs but the results were impressive.

See also: scratch adjective