AT THE old Scottish senior secondary school I attended, when you entered the First Year, the class you went into depended by and large on how you had done in your Qualifying Exam in Primary Seven.
A good result got you into 1A - immediately, aged 11 or 12, you were ear-marked as a future doctor, lawyer or teacher and you took Latin, then a necessity for university entrance. Not so-good result, 1B, like 1A a six-year course, perhaps pointing you in the direction of accountancy or banking or a civil service post. If you were put in 1C or 1D, you might, at best, aspire to a skilled trade: electrician, joiner, brick-layer, motor mechanic etc. Placed in 1E or 1F meant, in our part of Ayrshire, you were going down the pit at 15.
A further aspect of this class placing came on the sports field; the rugby team was almost exclusively made-up of A and B pupils - the football team was picked from the D, E and F streams by and large.
A couple of years ahead of us, we had a football team which bucked the trend, being almost entirely made up of A pupils, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime aberration, or so it seemed until the patter was repeated by the year below us.
That was a long intro, apparently about nothing - other than perhaps to sustain the fallacy that rugby players are somehow cleverer than footballers. Not true, some of the thickest sportsmen I have encountered were rugby players (and not always front five forwards) who went to public schools.
I mention this today, because the stupidity of footballers is again in the news, following Ashley Cole's "tweet" in the wake of his big mate John Terry's recent hammering from the FA.
Messrs Terry and Cole and, apparently, as much soul mates as team mates. To those of us on the outside, looking in, and relying on the despatches of "Fleet Street;s" Finest" - the Chelsea pair are a duo of charmless boors, whose only talent is their ability to kick a football. They therefore meet all the dubious talents expected of the modern-day Premiership footballer - over-paid, over-rated, over-priced, totally lacking in the social graces, self-awareness or common sense and living within their own little bubble of fast cars and air-headed fast WAGS.
But's that's exactly how the flash money men who run football want them and like them. Sure, they have the chance to earn a great deal of money over a short-term career; if they are lucky, they earn enough to set them up for life.
I suppose, if you are forced to spend 40 to 50 years down a pit (which thankfully is a fate which falls to few in this country today), being able, in your mid-thirties, to settle down to another 25 years of golf, glad-handing, and "media work", on the back of less than 20 years kicking a ball around, seems like a good deal - but, is it fulfilling?
After more than a century in existence, doesn't the "professional footballer" deserve a better career structure, or, at least, to have better role models than messrs Terry and Cole?
Would you like your son or grand-son to grow up to become John Terry or Ashley Cole? Me neither.
It is perhaps time, in my opinion, well past time, for football to spend as much time and money properly conditioning the hardest to work-on area of a footballer - the six inches between his ears - as it does his physique.
Association is the simplest of the many forms of football - but, it doesn't have to be played and administred by simpletons - as appears to happen today.
THE ABOVE rant leads me to my second point of the week. When, if ever, is Charles Green going to realise, the biggest challenge to his grand plan - if he has one - to make a quick killing and get out of Rangers ASAP is the lack of development of the same six inches mentioned above.
The current Rangers squad may well be the weakest and least-talented in the long history of "Rangers" (assuming we take the Sevco incarnation as Rangers continuing), but, it ought still be leading the SFL Third Division.
The fact the club is not MUST cause him to ask questions of his players and, more-importantly, of his management team. Or is he hoping, maybe, somehow, the imminent arrival of BDO will somehow save his somewhat dubious investment?
Shutting them down, might not, in the current climate of results, be a bad thing.
JUST a wee thought. In rugby at the top level - internationals and elite level professional club games, there are gentlemen known as "Citing commissioners", whose remit is to review video recordings of games to check-out potential incidences of foul play which the referees may have, in the maelstrum of crashing bodies on the floor, missed.
The presence of citing commissioners means, rugby at the top level is now a far, far cleaner game than ever before. The cheap shot has all but been eliminated, whilst the sly kick to the head has gone completely.
When will Football bite the bullet and introduce the citing commissioner at the highest level? Mind you, any such animal would first of all have to eliminate the diving cheats and the simulators. Once they were got rid of, football might flourish again.
ANENT this, no complaints from me on Steven Naismith's two-match ban for his elbowing of the Serb at Hampden in the last international. However, if you look at the incident, it is clear Naismith was reacting to a blatant off-the-ball take-out by the Serb. Maybe if the perpetrator of the original foul had cot a one-match ban, the message would get through about fair play.
Hitting Naismith with a ban - good. Not hitting the Serb - bad. So much for FIFA's Fair Play initiative.
I have made a very comfortable lifestyle on the back of being in a 1C - 1D classroom. No complaints from me.
ReplyDeleteAs for Sevco, it's obvious that Fat Sally does not have half the knowledge that Walter had in his time at the club.
Remove Green, remove Sally, Sevco then have a fighting chance. The fact that Green has asked for a meeting with Sally in London later this week is interesting. They have a fortnight between them to sort out the performances of his players before the axe might fall.
Time will tell.