THE news that Hibernian were signing young Airley from Newcastle United on a six-month loan deal set me thinking this morning. Might this be the way ahead for Scottish football and a means of making the SPL better?
By common consent, our top-flight league is considered fairly mediocre by European standards. OK, we are still within the top 20 of the 50-odd national leagues within UEFA, but we are a long way off the overall standards in the big leagues.
Increasingly these big leagues are recruiting their new blood from the poorer European nations, Africa, the traditional South American recruiting grounds of the Italian, Spanish and Portugese Leagues and now, in greater numbers, Asia. They bring in callow youths, feed them up, school them, then the bigger clubs send them to lesser teams to have the rough edges polished off, before re-calling them if they think they'll make it and selling them on if they think not.
The top English Premiership clubs have bought into this, the squad lists in the Premiership Academies reads like a League of Nations, with French, Spanish, Italian and Eastern European names are frequent, if not more obvious than Smiths, Jones and Macdonalds. Once through the Under-19 age group, these kids are either loaned-out or moved-on. So why shouldn't we up here get more of these kids on loan?
OK Airley is at Hibs, Kyle Bartley is at Rangers, Fraser Forster was at Celtic last season; but why don't we have more on-show up here? We are proud of our super seven Scottish-born Premiership managers, so why don't we approach King Kenny, Sir Alex and the five commoners, Messrs Coyle, Kean, Lambert, McLeish and Moyes to send us some of their youngsters for a year or two's tempering in the fire of the SPL?
Might they tell us, what some English critics have been telling us for years: "Your league's shite Jock"? I would not doubt their lack of patriotism - so maybe it's time we asked them to help-out the folks back home by sending us their youth, that we may teach them the right way, the Scottish way, to play football.
I watched a youthful Manchester United squad rip Ayr United apart in a pre-season friendly. None of these kids is anywhere near a first team shirt at Old Trafford; but I see no reason why Sir Alex might block-out a season at his beloved Pittodrie, under the tutelage of two men he surely trusts as being able to look after the kids and bring them on - Craig Brown and Archie Knox. It makes sense to me. And if Jack and Victor could bring them through, why not other Scottish managers?
STILL on the subject of player development, I was researching a historical piece this week, one which is due to be published in about two months, and I had a Eureka moment - let's use the juniors more.
Once upon a time would-be footballers followed a well-trod path. You started playing at school. If you were presumed to be any good and were lucky enough to get a Schoolboy cap - you had every chance of being whisked off to England, aged 14 or 15, for a ground staff job at a big club there. Then, it was up to you - if you made the grade, in time you'd get into the first team and perhaps win Scottish caps.
If you failed, you came back up the road and joined your local junior team. Getting into the juniors was also a stepping stone for your less-talented friends, who might leave school, play secondary juvenile or juvenile football, even churches league football, and in time get the call to a junior side.
The juniors was the ultimate finishing school; it made a man or an exhibit for medical students out of you and if you survived, there was every chance you could step-up to the senior ranks - but, in getting there you had survived a hard and at times lengthy apprenticeship.
Then, in the mid-sixties, it began to change, boys clubs began to become more important than schools in teaching the basics, schools football withered and all but died when the teachers went on strike in the early 1980s. Ground staff jobs gave way to apprenticeships, and somehow, we began to lose more talent than we developed.
The English clubs grew rich on the back of TV money and suddenly Scottish recruits were dull, over-familiar, buying continental became the thing.
Some boys still went down the boys club route into the junior ranks, where they were increasingly competing with one-time boy wonders who hadn't made the senior grade and been dumped - while all but the lesser Scottish senior clubs stopped scouting in the juniors, prefering to recruit drop-outs from the bigger clubs's disjointed youth development ranks.
But, I feel, in today's fiscally-challenged Scottish game - it is time to look anew at the juniors.
The SPL no longer runs a Reserve League and increasingly all but the very best youngsters are released once they are too-old for the U-19 team. Some of these players might be "late developers" - look at Steven Dobie, released by Rangers at 20, eight years later, after a peripatetic career in the lower leagues here and in England, is in the Premiership with Swansea; others simply not good enough; still more needing more time.
How might it work if an SPL club, say Kilmarnock, had half a dozen players coming out of their U-19 team, whom they couldn't immediately put into their small SPL squad, but whom they wished to keep tabs on. They could surely find a way of keeping them within the club's sphere of influence, by perhaps loaning them out to a local junior club, let's say Irvine Meadow.
These players could perhaps train two or three days per week with Killie - on reduced wages; train the other two with the Meadow, for whom they would play on a Saturday - but could be re-called to Killie if needed.
I'd call that win, win all round. That's just a sketched outline of what could happen; making it happen would need more thought. But, I could see such a scenario benefitting both the junior and the senior club - not to mention the player, who would be getting regular games. I feel we ought to be looking at such schemes more.
One of the things which got me thinking about the desirability of a spell in the juniors was reading 'The Ghost of White Hart Lane' Robert White's book, co-written by Julie Welch, about his late, brilliant father John White.
"The Ghost" - John White - was never more than nine and a half stone, wringing wet, but he and the equally slight "Slim" Jim Baxter formed the best Scottish central midfield pairing I have ever seen. Together they destroyed teams, while the Spurs midfield trio of the wonderful 1961 double-winning side: White, skipper Danny Blanchflower and Dave Mackay was sensational.
White's career included a spell with Bonnyrigg Rose Athletic, Mackay played for Newtongrange Star, as did the almost as celebrated Alex Young, Baxter played for Crossgates Primrose, Kenny Dalglish played for Cumbernauld United, Jimmy Johnstone for Blantyre Celtic, Billy McNeill, like Jock Stein before him, served Blantyre Victoria.
A spell in the juniors didn't hurt these icons - let's bring it back.
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