Woe, Woe And Thrice Woe - We're Shite And We Know We Are: Well It's Time To DAE SOMETHING

IT IS sometimes suggested, after repeated blows, the recipient becomes numb and no longer feels them. Well, I'm 70, but, even after last night's latest kick in the goolies, I still felt it. It's God's punishment for us being Scottish, being part of: “The Greatest Wee Nation God Ever Put Breath Into” - “The Football Master Race” (thanks for that one Alex Ferguson) - “The Chosen People” and all those other wee aphorisms we Scots hang onto.

You'd think having the English for neighbours would be enough pain for one nation to have to bear, but, no, we get the World Cup and the European Championship qualifiers to grind us down.

Ach! Look on the bright side; going out now saves us from even-more pain when we DO get into the big show. For example:

• 1954 – we lost 7-0 to Uruguay.
• 1958 – we lost to Paraguay, a place we couldn't even find on the map.
• 1974 – Billy Bremner misses from two feet, then the Zaire keeper and defence go awol.
• 1978 – Peru, but, even worse – Iran.
• 1982 – Hansen and Miller.
• 1986 – Play 89 minutes against ten men and cannot win
• 1990 – Costa Rica, then the cry was no defenders after a Leighton save.
• 1998 – Morocco beat us. FFS, that's where Bob Hope and Bing Crosby once went.

The first football match I remember was: “The Matthews Cup Final” in 1953. At least once in each of the 64-years since, I've had a sickener from fitba, and, were I to list them, an awful lot of these sickeners would involve Scotland.

At least poor old Devon Loch only fell once – compared to Scotland's ability to trip themselves up, old Dick Francis and his poor horse had it easy.

 Dik Francis and Devon Loch - was that horse Scottish?

But hey, we're Scottish; what was that book title: 'It's the hope that kills'.

Now, I suppose, we will need to find a scapegoat – step forward Mr Strachan. OK, WHY, at 1-1, did the wee man not say: “Right if it stays like this we're oot, so, we might as well go oot fighting, and go gung-ho for victory? Against Slovakia, we hit the woodwork, we forced their 'keeper to make a string of world-class saves. In the next match, where winning was even-more important, we gave their 'keeper a relatively-easy night. When push came to shove, we started pulling back and bottled it.

That has to go down to bad management, to the: “let's not lose” mentality of today's gaffers. At 1-1 WGS should have been out there, waving them forward. Nobody did fierce charges like the Highland regiments – the Ladies from Hell, where was that attitude when we needed it on Sunday night?

The Ladies From Hell at full gallop - where was that attitude on Sunday night?

The English codified, some might say invented football as the organised, 11-a-side world game as we know it, but, it was the Scots, the “Men with the educated feet” from Queen's Park, the “Scotch Professors” from the Vale of Leven and elsewhere who turned the individualistic, dribbling and hacking English game into the close-passing, along the ground “beautiful game” it became. Has Scotland offered any innovation or new thinking about football since 1880?

No, since then, it has been “aye-beenism”, don't rock the boat, safety-first fitba. OK, we had the odd flowering of invention, the Lisbon Lions being perhaps the best example in recent history. It's maybe time for us to rediscover Scottish invention, marry it to the Presbyterian work ethic and start the claw back to greatness.

How do we do that? Well, we could start by calling a general meeting of the SFA at Hampden, then blowing the place up, with all the “suits” inside. I know, that's a bit drastic, but, can anyone reading this suggest any other way of getting rid of the main drawback to success for Scottish football – the twats who supposedly run the game – and I don't mean the likes of Regan and Doncaster – I mean the real numpties, the club directors who have quite happily sat on their fat erses, as their faithers and uncles did before them, and made no effort to improve things or to innovate.

Yes, WGS has his faults and failings, but, I defy anyone to get us to a big show with what we currently have, not least the Scottish system. And don't give me this genetics Jackie Baillie (the new, officially-mandated by Holyrood Scottish word for pish) – that idea about Scotland being too wee or whatever was discredited long before Johanna Lamont borrowed it for political capital.

The truth is – to purloin a Tartan Army chant from 1996: “We're shite, and we know we are.” The Tartan Army was aware of our short-comings 21-years ago, when are the “suits” on Hampden's sixth floor going to catch-on and actually dae something about the situation?

Russia has gone, we now have 11-months before the new-look 2020 European Championships qualifying round begins. As things stand today, we will be in League C along with - Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Greece, Norway, Israel, Bulgaria, Finland, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania. These nations will be split into one group of three, and three groups of four.

Let's be honest here – the only other nations in League C with anything like our football pedigree are Romania, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria. If we cannot do well among that lot, we should maybe simply chuck it and revert to shinty, curling and bowling.

Ach! Ah'm still fair scunnered.