We Have Had Better Weekends

WHAT a lousy weekend. On Friday night, our Women's team, a beacon of light during recent disasters for the Men's team, were cruelly exposed and thumped by Iceland, in their European Championship qualifier. Then, on Saturday morning, we learned of the death of The Greatest – Muhammad Ali – before, on Saturday night, the Scotland Men's team were given a footballing lesson by the French. The way things are going, I am not too hopeful for Andy Murray's chances on the red clay of Stade Rolland Garros this afternoon.

I have long championed the Scottish Women's team; indeed, the SWFA is perhaps the beacon of good sense along the Bedlam of Hampden's sixth floor “Corridor of Power”. Because those running the SWFA are, 1, women, and 2, not hide-bound by the dogma of Scottish sporting administration: “Ye canna dae that son, it's aye been done this way”, they have been, for some time, an under-appreciated progressive alternative to the hide-bound conservatism of the SFA “blazers” next door.

In the SWFA, the national team comes first, in the SFA, it often appears to come last.

However, on Friday night, at Falkirk, the girls got a doing, and a bad one. Of course, the Icelandic women are a class act, and, rightly, one of the favourites for next year's Women's Euros in the Netherlands. It is fair too, to say Scotland had a bad night at the office. They defended crosses with all the authority of Rangers, the passes didn't stick, it was a horror show.

Maybe their big wins against the minnows in their group had given us a false sense of how good our girls are, but, it is clear, Women's football is where the Men's game was back in the 1960s – with a few class teams, a lot of poor teams and poor old Scotland somewhere in the middle.

Then came Saturday night. I settled down to listen to the live BBC Scotland broadcast of the game v France – I turned off when the third goal went in. Fortunately, the French decided to soft-pedal after half-time, giving their bench a run, they have bigger fish to fry later this month. The game was over at 3-0, we might just as well have gone home and curtailed a bad season 45 minutes early.

David Marshall - saved us from thrashings from Italy and France

So, apart from confirming we are shite, but, that David Marshall is a “World Class” goalkeeper, what have we learned from our couple of end-of-season friendlies?

Well, I think we have learned, it doesn't really matter who is Scotland manager, he does not have the tools to work with, in terms of player talent. Quite honestly, we might as well withdraw from the 2018 World Cup qualifying now, we will do well to finish third in our group.

Scotland will do nothing and get nowhere in top-level world football, until we blow up Hampden, with all the SFA blazers securely locked inside, and start again from the beginning. Aye Beenism is not working, it has not worked for years and we are kidding ourselves if we think the stumblebums and self-servers who rule the roost now are going to change things, or allow things to change.

We are all doomed, doomed Ah tell ye laddie.

Johnny Coyle in action for Dundee United

Word came through last week, a couple of weeks after his death, of the passing of perhaps the unluckiest player in Scottish football history – Johnny Coyle.

To those reading who have never heard of Johnny, read on. He was a Dundee bricklayer who, in a little over two and a half seasons with Dundee United, between 1955 and 1957, scored goals for fun. United were at that time, very much the poor relations in Tannadice Street. The switch to tangerine shirts was still a decade or so away, they played in black and white hoops and rarely got above mid-table in Division B as the second tier in the senior game was then termed.

Coyle arrived from Dundee St Joseph's in 1950, but, between doing his National Service and a spell out on loan to Brechin City, not to mention competition for places, it wasn't until 1955 that he established the number nine jersey as his. He went on to score 112 goals in 132 games, before United sold him, for £8000, to Clyde in December, 1957.

In his first half-season at Shawfield, he scored 31 goals, including a hat-trick in a 3-2 Scottish Cup final win over Motherwell and a double in what was only the Bully Wee's third Glasgow Charity Cup victory win, beating Rangers 4-0 at Hampden.

Oh aye, and there was the small matter of the only goal of the game, albeit with the help of a wicked deflection off John Baxter, as Clyde beat Hibs 1-0 to win the Scottish Cup, in front of over 95,000 fans at Hampden in April, 1958.

During that season, Lawrie Reilly, who had been Scotland's first-choice centre forward for the past eight years, and who had scored 22 goals in his 38 internationals, was forced to retire through injury. Scotland were finding him difficult to replace. In the season in question they drew 1-1 wit Northern Ireland, beat Switzerland 3-2 to clinch their place in the World Cup Finals, drew 1-1 with Wales and lost 4-0 to England. Jackie Mudie, who had replaced Reilly as Scotland's centre forward, scored just once – the second goal against Switzerland.

Now, given Coyle was scoring so-freely, and given his club trainer, Dawson Walker, was in all but name, Scotland's team manager, you might have thought a cap was coming his way in the end of season friendly against Hungary, at Hampden. Trouble was, Walker didn't pick the team; that job was too-important to be left to the professional, the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers of the SFA's Selection Committee decided which 11 players would play, and, they decided not to include Coyle.

To be fair to Mudie, he did score Scotland's goal in a 1-1 draw with the no-longer Mighty Magyrs, his 8^th goal in 13 internationals, but, the “Fans with Typewrters” in the Scottish Football Writers Association were already calling for Coyle to be given his chance in the final pre-World Cup warm-up, against Poland in Warsaw.

He watched from the stand as a brace from Bobby Collins gave the Scots a 2-1 win. He was then left out of the team which played a local Swedish club in a bounce game, and from the team which opened Scotland# World Cup campaign with a 1-1 draw with Yugoslavia.

Next up was Paraguay, who kicked the Scots off the park in beating us 3-2. Finally, after just two wins in eight games that season, the selectors rang the changes for the final “must win” group game against France. They made six personnel and two positional changes, including dropping captain Tommy Younger, but, in a game in which goals were a necessity, the selectors again left Coyle in the stand.

We took 22 players to Sweden, Coyle was one of five not to get a game, the others being his club skipper, Harry Haddock, Tommy Docherty, and the Rangers' pair, Alex Scott and Ian McColl. The other four were all capped prior to the World Cup, but Coyle never got a game in Sweden, and indeed, uniquely never even got a cap.

He left Clyde at the end of the 1959-60 season, moving south to join non-league Cambridge City. Between his part-time football earnings and his full-time Monday to Friday earnings as a bricklayer with the Cambridge chairman's building company, he was a lot better-off in the Southern League than in the Scottish one.

He struggled to establish himself at Cambridge, but, he kept scoring before retiring to concentrate on laying bricks rather than scoring goals. John Coyle died, in Cambridge, aged 83, on 14 May. I don't know how good a brickie he was, but, with 171 goals in 217 games in Scotland, that's 0.8 goals per game, he was certainly a better than average striker, hitting the net at better than the 0.5 gpg which is the benchmark for a top-quality goal-scorer. All his goals came with unfashionable clubs. What might he have done in Sweden?