Too-Wee, Too-Poor, Too-Stupid - I'll Give The SFA One Out Of Three

The SFA - too-wee, too-poor and too-stupid to force through change

SCOTTISH football simply has to be the ultimate Unionist sport – if we look at it from the perspective of a YES-voting, pro-Independence person such as I. Celtic have a really bad night in Europe, and again the doom-sayers are insisting, Scottish football is, like the Unionists' view of the overall Scottish economy and political scene: “Too-wee, too-poor and too-stupid”, to survive alone in Europe. The too-stupid argument I will not go against, when you consider how badly-governed the game up here has been since Sir George Graham retired 60-years ago, well, it goes without saying.

I refuse to believe what the Lisbon Lions did will never be done again. I would never under-estimate how difficult it might be to replicate their feat of winning the European Cup, with a team, all born within 35-miles of their home ground, but, I will never say never again. Occasionally, some freakish event will throw-up a great team. Scotland, for instance, had never beaten England at Schools Under-15 basketball until, in the 1970s, by some unexpected turn of events, seven boys arrived at Cumnock Academy – five of them were put into Bute House in that school, and they developed into an amazing basketball team, so good that, when the Scotland Under-15 team was picked, four of those Bute boys were in the Scottish starting five, the fifth was second man off the bench, while the other three – not in Bute, were also in the Scotland squad, which beat England.

Today, 40-years on, the point guard from that team could still find the small, shooting forward with a pass, blind-folded, in the dark at midnight. They had that sort of understanding. But, the Lisbon Lions did not have that sort of understanding from school. Sure, several came through the Kelly Kids reserve set-up together, but, there was a spread of ages, time in the first team, and, Ronnie Simpson and Willie Wallace were bought-in as the finished article, while Bertie Auld was let go by Celtic, then brought back.

 The Lisbon LIons - they evolved and had real domestic competition

The team didn't begin that season as a settled unit. The Celtic team for the opening game of that season was: Simpson; Gemmell, O'Neill; Murdoch, McNeill Clark, Johnstone McBride, Chalmers, Lennox, Auld. For the first match of their successful European campaign, Bobby Lennox didn't play, Bertie Auld was at 10 and John Hughes 11. Jim Craig didn't become a regular until well into the season, Willie Wallace was bought to replace the injured Joe McBride, in fact, over that entire season, Celtic used 22 players, including three goalkeepers, so, it wasn't a case of a great team of 11 men coming together for that season.

Of course, they did have rather a good manager, to bring the best out of them. Well, I refuse to believe how that team came together, and the success they had, was a one-off, and that there will never again be a Scottish manager capable of melding a disparate bunch of players into a unit which can become the best in Europe. I reckon, had Jock Stein been managing Scotland that season, while he would certainly have picked several of that team – Bobby Brown, who actually was Scotland boss, selected Simpson, Gemmell, Wallace and Lennox for the team which beat England at Wembley – he would not have picked that team en masse for Scotland.

But, he got the best out of them, and they and he became football immortals.

It helped too, that the Lisbon Lions had genuine competition that season. Rangers nearly won the Cup-Winners Cup, Kilmarnock reached the semi-finals of the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (now part of the Europa League), Dundee United reached the round of 16 – beating Barcelona along the way, while Dunfermline reached the round of 32. We had a quality of club and depth of talent back then which we do not seem to have today. Somewhere, sometime in the last 50-years, Scottish football lost its way. I refuse to believe this detour cannot be corrected.

Of course the ridiculous sums of money washing around in the English Premiership have grotesquely skewed the football landscape, but, it was ever thus – we've been exporting our best to England for nigh-on 150 years, but, it never used to hold us back. We can rise again, but, a lot of things will need to change.

MY ESTEEMED colleague, Aristotle Armstrong, here in the Sports Philosophy Department of the Scottish University of Sporting Life was today much exercised by the formations in which Rugby Union XVs were laid-out to help the public and our poor beleaguered sports journalists. The old duffer managed to cobble together a discussion paper on the subject and publish it, before I did my 'Four Yorkshiremen' impression and told him: “Huh! You have it easy.”

Because, if you look at every football report in a Scottish newspaper, you will find the teams written-out in 2-3-5 formation – one goalkeeper, two full-backs, three half-backs and five forwards. Everyone in Scotland understands this, but, no Scottish team has lined-up in that formation since before World War II. In the immediate post-war era, say the ten years or so between the close of hostilities and their resumption with the start of the European Cup, every Scottish side, club or international lined-up in more-or-less 3-4-3 formation. The goalie had in front of him, two full-backs and a centre-half, whose job was to defend. Then there were the four midfield men, the right and left-halves and the inside-right and inside-left, who did the box-to-box fetching and carrying, leaving the two wingers and the centre-forward to concentrate on getting the goals.

Look at a Scotland team of the time, such as the team which famously beat England in “Jimmy Cowan's Match”, at Wembley in 1949. Cowan had the Rangers trio of skipper George Young, pivot Willie Woodburn and left-back Sammy Cox guarding him. Wing-halves Bobby Evans and George Aitken and inside-men Jimmy Mason and Billy Steel did the fetching and carrying, leaving Willie Waddell, Billy Houliston and Lawrie Reilly to keep the English rearguard occupied. If the numbers had matched the positions, Young would have worn 2, Woodburn 3, Cox 4, Evans 5, Mason 6, Aitken 7, Steel 8, Waddell 9, Houliston 10 and Reilly 11. Instead, in number order, the formation was: 1, Cowan(except goalkeepers were un-numbered back then), 2, Young and 3, Cox; 4, Evans, 5, Woodburn and 6, Aitken; 7, Waddell, 8, Mason, 9, Houliston, 10, Steel and 11, Reilly.

Ten of the Scotland team which beat England in 1949 are in this group from their next international, against France. But, their numbers bore little relation to where they played. Willit Thornton for Jimmy Mason is the one change from the Wembley XI.

Gradually, after Brazil introduced the formation in winning the 1958 World Cup, football adopted the 4-2-4 formation, which was soon tweaked into 4-3-3, then, as we became more-sophisticated, “Christmas Trees” and other exotica were introduced – but, doggedly and resolutely, the British media has continued to list our teams in 2-3-5 formation. And, that formation is always written right to left. Well, not quite, I once worked with one of the first female football writers, who always insisted, since teams in pictures were always listed left-to-right, so too should football team formations be written thus.

I tried to tell her, no football teams go right to left, but, no, she was not having it. I appealed to the boss, the Editor to put her right, but, while he would quite happily out-Alex Ferguson Alex Ferguson when applying the “hair dryer” treatment to a male journalist who had displeased him, he was quite incapable of telling-off a female one – a failing which made his life very difficult, and didn't help the rest of us either. I settled for changing her copy when proofing the pages.