Tell It Like It Is

FOOTBALL writers are supposedly "different" from all other journalists.

Political journalists, war correspondents, economics and business writers, in fact any journalist with a speciality, they all spend as much, if not more time with the people they are writing about than do football writers.

For all some press boxes these days are like technical areas, so many former footballers are there cluttering up the surroundings, by and large the guys writing about the game are enthusiastic amateurs, rather than the former or practicing professionals who write about other areas of life.

But we tend to be less harsh on the guys we're writing about than fellow specialist writers. This was brought home to me some years ago, when the theatre critic on the daily newspaper I then wrote for pulled me up for soft-pedalling my criticism of the local team after a particularly dire performance.

Warming to his theme, he upbraided me for a quotes-led back page piece: "Dear boy, I don't trot round to the stage door at the end of a play and ask Sir Ian McKellan: 'how do you feel the third act went' : or to 'talk me through the second act soliloquy'; so why should you ask a team manager whose side had just lost to make a plea in mitigation.

"In covering a football match - theatre for the masses - you are a critic, so don't be afraid to criticise".

I was then the football writer in a one-club paper in a one-club town. Such were and still is the incestuousness of life in such places, to be too critical of the local football team was and is to find doors closing in one's face, and remaining firmly shut.

Of course, in an ideal world, a football writer, frozen out by his local team is immediately free to tell it like it is. Sadly, in small-town Scotland, friends of the directors quickly cut their advertising, the disapproval of the great and the good is made known to the advertising department, who lean on editorial and after a grovelling apology is made, situation normal resumes.

I only once saw this challenged. I quite rightly criticised a particular player for an outrageous match-costing mistake. His mother took umbrage and used her considerable leverage to force the club into banning me from the ground.

My editor therefore decided, the club, which got most of the back page every day, would only get a maximum of two paragraphs per day of exposure. They had a midweek match on the Tuesday and that's what they got in Wednesday morning's paper: score, scorers, end of.

The editor and I spent the first two hours on Wednesday morning, answering irate calls from supporters, share holders and season ticket holders, all of whom we told exactly what had happened, how and why.

At just before lunch time on Wednesday, the Chairman came in, disappeared into the editor's office, half an hour later I was summoned and ten minutes later normal service was resumed.

That's how to do it. Show them you're not scared of them, you don't need them and you're free to praise and criticise as you see fit. Football clubs need the free publicity they get from the media far more than the media needs football, and we don't need to be so cosy with them.

The reason for this piece is: Scottish football is in a mess, the SPL is in a mess, the top teams are in a mess.

With the honourable exception of Motherwell, who under Craig Brown and Archie Knox - the Still Game Jack and Victor of Scottish football - have performed well in Europe, our results have stunk to high heaven.

But, our football writers have a) failed to mention this: b) been largely uncritical and c) are not serving the fans or the game well by not saying this.

Back in 1996, as they trooped out of Wembley after losing to an average England side in the European Championship finals, the Tartan Army sang: "We're shite and we know we are".

Fourteen years on, we're still shite, we still know it, but the Scottish Football Writers Association, the so-called, self-declared Intelligence Corps of the Tartan Army are not making that fact clear enough to the blazers who are the only ones who can force change - so that the long-awaited and much-needed changes are put in place.

Come on guys, stop being PR spin doctors for Scottish football and start being critics.