Wanted - Men Of Vision

IN the week in which we buried Jimmy Reid, it is pertinent to ask: When will we see his like again?" Because, men of vision such as Jimmy are thin on the ground in 21st century Scotland.

Given a government threat to close down their workplace, the average trade union response, today as back in 1970 is: "right lads - down tools and out the door", thereby precipitating closure; it took real shrewdness to, as Jimmy and the UCS shop stewards showed, to work-in.

Let's take another example of Scotsmen doing the unexpected and indeed, thinking the unthinkable - when the lords of the Scottish parliament in 1707 threw-in their lot with England.

Burns later labelled them: "Sic a parcel o rogues in a nation".

Maybes aye, maybes naw - but, thanks to the Scots, the British Empire became greater than any English Empire might have been. Of course, in the end, the English got greedy, tried to take all the credit, all the money and wanted things done their way - which pissed-off a lot of right-thinking Scots, cue the rise of Scottish nationalism (small n you note), arguments and devolution. Next stop independence.

Now the controversial bit. Maybe the Lords who run the SFA should be thinking the unthinkable - maybe it's time to sue for football union with England.

Nothing new there; when Scot William McGregor of Aston Villa and that patrician former public schoolboy Charles W Allcock were the leading players in making the Football Association and the Football League the leading sporting bodies in the country, they didn't see these as being English organisations - they wanted pan-British organisations.

OK, the international football team of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as the country then was) would have been and still would be "England", except a bunch of thrawn men in the south of Glasgow objected - Queen's Park became Scotland and a one hundred years plus sporting war began.

But today, the Scottish domestic football market is to small. We will survive as an international nation, albeit slipping gracefully down the standings into genteel poverty of status and ambition, but, our club game is doomed - because we cannot compete with the elephant next door - England.

But, if we were in one FA, one league set-up, it might work.

Or maybe, joining England is simply the move we cannot make.

But, we have to do something, the status quo is not an option.

So, where are the men with the wit, imagination and vision to come up with a solution which guarantees a future for Scottish club football. This may be union with England, it might be a Magners-style Celtic League; it could be a North Atlantic League; a North Sea League; even an amalgamation of the small nations in Europe into a pressure group.

What it cannot be is the current situation of three tiny, self-seeking groups, in which the same men make different decisions according to whether they are wearing their club hats, their SPL or SFL hats, their Forfarshire/Stirlingshire/East of Scotland/North of Scotland/West of Scotland FA hats or their SFA Glengarry.

And don't get me started on those ego-driven message boys - the managers; the men whose every utterance is treated as gospel, but whose only function is to spend as much of the real decision-makers' money as they can, while asking for more.