SAY WHAT YOU LIKE about the Butchers, Bakers and Candle-Stick Makers who ran Scottish Fitba for so-many years, but, they did ken how to pauchle a cup draw to keep the Bigot Brothers apart up until the final. In recent seasons, with the seeming need for transparency and a televised draw the two balls, whether they were oval and square, or one hot, one cold, which kept them apart, appear to have been lost and you have occasions, such as Sunday evening's League Cup semi-final draw, where the arch-rivals come out together before the final. It never happened in the Golden Years.
Since it's ma baw, so to speak, on this thread, may I again indulge myself with a long-standing personal rant: why don't the High Heid Yins in the SPFL throw a curve ball into their League Cup competition by invoking Chick Young's “eight diddies rule” and insisting that there be a minimum of eight Scottish-qualified players on the field in both teams at all times?
Whichever club wins Scotland's third-most-important cup competition does so only for the temporary glory. Winning doesn't get you into Europe the following season, it carries no benefit other than a transient high, a wee bit of money and temporary bragging rights over your nearest rivals. I mean, the most-memorable legacies of recent wins by clubs other than The Big Two have been the various renditions of Sunshine On Leith by the Hibernian Community Choir and the fact, Dieter van Tornhout, a Belgian journeyman who isn't even a household name in his own household, may some day have a statute in his honour erected in Kilmarnock.
Make the clubs field those eight Scots, it would certainly level the playing field and help take the competition back to being the open event it was in its early days.
The combatants in the first ten League Cup Finals, the team named first winning, were:
Rangers v Aberdeen
East Fife v Falkirk
Rangers v Raith Rovers
East Fife v Dunfermline
Motherwell v Hibernian
Dundee v Rangers
Dundee v Kilmarnock
East Fife v Partick Thistle
Heart of Midlothian v Motherwell
Aberdeen v St Mirren
Thirteen different clubs involved, six different winners in a decade. In the last decade, only eight clubs have contested the final, these ten finals producing four different winners. Celtic have been in seven of those finals, winning all of them; Ross County, St Johnstone and Rangers are the other three winners.
Forty players were listed in the team lines for last season's Old Firm Final, only seven of these: Greg Taylor and Callum McGregor (the only two Scottish starters) and substitutes Anthony Ralston and James Forrest of Celtic and Rangers' Liam Kelly, Leon King and Connor Barron were Scottish. That's 17.5% of the total number of players involved in a national cup final were from that nation, while only 9% of those players considered good enough to start the game were from the home nation. This is nothing less than a scandal – you have to ask, why does the national governing body for any sport allow this to happen? Do they not have a duty to pro-actively ensure their clubs encourage home-grown talent?
Of course, neither club is Scottish-controlled. The major decisions around Celtic are made in Dublin, while the men who hold sway across the city these days are based in San Francisco. Is this good for Scottish Football?
Another aspect of Sunday's quarter-final from Firhill was yet another “Sack the Board” demonstration from the Green Brigade and their friends. It is not unusual to see elements in one or other of the two big clubs' support being unhappy and finding something to moan about – when your unreasonable expectations of glory are not being met, it is easy to complain. But, both clubs' hard-core support up in arms at the same time, that is strange.
Mickey Stewart was a better-than-average player - back when he was a boy you had to have a wee bit of talent to get a game for Manchester United – and he did win four Scotland caps. However, he has shown himself an even-better pundit and he came up with an interesting Steve Wright Factoid: Celtic have recruited 13 new players over the last transfer window – and still the GB and their friends are unhappy.
That's an entirely new starting line-up, with a couple more on the bench. What more do they want? OK, the guys the club have brought in may not be Galacticos, but, unless you are paying totally unrealistic wages and granting them ridiculous concessions in terms of contract riders, the few genuine Galacticos playing today are NOT going to come to Scotland.
If you're simply going for the money and wanting to play in a Diddy League – perhaps looking for a last big pay day before hanging-up the boots – you tell your agent to get you a gig in Saudi Arabia, not Scotland.
The two clubs have always been the biggest in the country, at least since the advent of professionalism and league football. There have been prior to this one:
118 League Championship campaigns
1 – the very first – was shared by Dumbarton and Rangers
Rangers have since won 54
Celtic have won 55
Aberdeen, Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian have each won 4
Third Lanark, Motherwell, Dundee, Kilmarnock and Dundee United have each won 1 title – Dumbarton has won 1 title outright and shared that first one with Rangers
The Big Two have, between them, won the last 40 League Championship campaigns.
Over the years the High Heid Yins of our game have shuffled the deck-chairs more than all the crews of all the Cunard ships ever did; but, it doesn't seem to matter what they try – the same two clubs keep on winning the title.
It is often said: the rules are skewed to keep them at the top and ought to be changed, because, as long as they vote together on the big issues, they can frustrate the would-be modernisers. Then, Rangers hit a large financial problem and were relegated to the bottom tier, leaving Celtic isolated in the voting, but, Aberdeen sided with The Hoops and the chance of change was lost.
This didn't work out too well for the Dandy Dons, who have since found winning difficult.
I've said this before, I will doubtless say it again, but, until we have genuine, meaningful change which levels the playing field, the Big Two will continue to dominate and the other 40 will struggle. But, for this change to happen, the rest have to show the unity which has long been missing.
They say: “Turkeys will not vote for Christmas”. Well, the currently 40 “Diddy Teams” have been season-long Christmas Dinners for the Bigot Brothers since 1890, Haven't they thought of really changing the menu – not tinkering with the starters, the veggies or the desserts – really changing things to their advantage?
Invoking the “Eight Diddies Rule” might be a good place to start.
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