Rise Now And Be A Major Football Nation Again

HE MAY, or, he may not have said it, but, old Abe Lincoln gets the blame for the quote:

“You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but, you cannot fool all of the people, all of the time”.

Now, somewhere during their education, the hacks of the Scottish Football Writers Association must have come across that quote – trouble is, to my mind, many of them keep trying to disprove the third part – the bit about fooling all of the people all of the time. Or, maybe, they are reading at as: “Ra Peepul”.

Take, as a good starting point – this wide-spread belief that Scotland is actually good at football. I accept, this was true once upon a time, but, and I turn 70 next month, it has never been true in my lifetime, as the following diagram will demonstrate.

Scotland played in the first International Football Match, at Hamilton Crescent, in the West End of Glasgow, on 30 November, 1872. The opposition came from England, and the game finished 0-0.

So, we are now in the 15^th decade of Scottish international football, here are our results, broken down, over those 15 decades:

Decade         p.         w.         d.         l.         for         agnst         %won         %pts won       

1870s          12           8          2           2         41            15           66.67           72.22

1880s          26         22          3           1        110           32           84.62           88.46

1890s          30         19          5           6        100           48           63.33           68.89

1900s          30         15          7           8          70           31           50.00           57.78

1910s          15          7           6          2          20           10            46.67           60.00

1920s          33         23          5          5          79           30            69.70            74.75

1930s          42         22          8         12         85           61            52.38            58.73

1940s          17          7           3          7         29           24            41.18             47.06

1950s          67         32         16        19        131         102           47.76             55.72

1960s          63         29         13        21        140         110           46.03             52.91

1970s          88         37         19        32        107          98           42.05             49.24

1980s          88         35         25        28        102          82           39.77             49.24

1990s          90         37         23        30        108          87           41.11             49.63

2000s          85         33         20        32          96        101           38.82             46.67

2010s          58         25         10        23         75          74            43.10             48.85

These figures only go up to the end of last season (2015/2016) and I have, for easy reference, awarded three points for a win, one for a draw, from the start. However, as can be seen, apart from a couple of minor hiccups, the graph has been going steadily downwards since that high-water mark of the 1880s, when Scotland really was the best team in the world.

But, the current refrain from the SFWA is that we are some way off the glory days of the 1970s, when we had teams choc-a-bloc with “world class” talent, and were a real force in the football world.

Well, right now, when, according to some of the Fans with Lap Tops, Wee Gordon Strachan has to go, since he is presiding over the terminal decline of Scottish football, we have actually won a higher percentage of games than in those glory days of Bremner, Law, Gemmill, Souness and Co.

In the 1980s, we qualified from all three World Cup qualifying campaigns in that decade, but, we for all our lack of material success in such measurements as qualifying for European Championship or World Cup finals, we have actually won a higher percentage of games under alleged stumblebums George Burley, Craig Levein and WGS than we did under Jock Stein, Alex Ferguson and Andy Roxburgh.

“Football – funny old game Saint”, as one English legend was want to point-out.

I accept, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Perhaps the truth is, we have bumbled along, somewhere in the middle layer of European and perhaps World Football ever since the end of World War II. We have found our level, become stuck in a rut, and, the High Heid Yins in the sixth floor corridor of power at Hampden either don't know how to get us out of that rut, or, and I fear this is the more-likely reason, aren't too-bothered about doing something about it.

But once, long, long ago – when the British Empire was at its zenith; when the sun never set on the Union Flag and Empress Victoria was on the throne – Scotland ruled the football world just as surely.

I don't believe these days could never come back, but, if they are to, then we need to put in a lot more work on making our game fit for purpose, of making our players fit for purpose, and of encouraging Scottish talent than we have done during my lifetime.

A question: does anyone reading this think Andy Murray, the world's Number One tennis player would have become the world's Number One footballer, had he stuck to football and signed for Hibs?

No, me neither.

A wee bit of honesty from our football journalists, who are supposed to hold those in authority to account, to point-out the wee (and big) things the High Heid Yins would rather we ignored, might be a good place to start.

My hope for January 2017, and I accept it is a pretty hopeless hope, is that, the lads in the Lap Top Loyal, the “stenographers” from our moribund media suddenly start asking the right questions of the right people, and spend less time taking down inane quotes from the usual suspects of Rentagob former Old Firm players.

Let's light a fire under the time-servers and wasters at the top of our game, and start getting back to where we want our game to be.