Calm Down Lads - It's Only A Game

FOOTBALL is not coming home then, and, while every Scot should be relieved, that our English-based media will not be able to bring-up 2018 quite as often as they have 1966 over the past 50-plus years, we ought not to be over-pleased that the 2018 World Cup will be won by someone other than England.

 

Never mind England - it's only a game

By rights, we should have supported our next-door neighbours, the players we are most-familiar with via TV and the other branches of our media. Except, as all us Scots ken fine – God gave us the English as neighbours to compensate for the many blessings he bestowed on this land of the Scots; while he gave us the mentality to allow them to lie, twist and cheat us as our overlords – so they think – to offset our natural: here's tae us, wha's like us arrogance.

Hopefully, Croatia will have us asking, if a nation that wee can get to a World Cup Final, why cannot we? It's a simple question, but difficult to answer. For me, it comes down to the fact, for over a century – in Scottish football, if you want to make it big, you had three options:

• Get a move to England
• Join Rangers
• Join Celtic

And, that third option, was quite often a precursor to option one. The High Road to England has been: “the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees,” since that old ham Dr Samuel Johnson came up with the line back in the 18^th century. Today ambitious Scottish players don't seek to improve themselves to the extent of being targets for Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich or any of the top Italian sides – naw, the obscene money sloshing around in even the second tier of the financially over-heated English game will do. And in any case, you don't have to learn a new language, or adapt to a foreign lifestyle.

Similarly, our club owners don't have to bother too-much about improving their players, of making them work harder on their technical skills and fitness. There might just be something in this thing about people being Scotland's greatest export you know.

Jamie the Saxth, when he high-tailed it south to become James I, King of England took some of his hingers-oan with him. These barons and clan chiefs quickly adapted to the crush the peasants mindset of their English contemporaries, and, back up the road, they began to clear their clansmen off their lands, to be replaced by sheep.

The braver displaced Scots went off to build-up Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States. The less-brave headed for Glasgow, or maybe even England. And so it began. The Clearances gave way to a gradual drift South and West, as others realised how well Tam, Jock and Erchie had done there, until today, I think we are left with the descendants of those too-feart to get out. If you keep moving-on your best stock, eventually, the quality of what you have left will deteriorate.

England's problem is, they have a top league which is virtually all-powerful in the politics of their domestic game. It is run to suit them, and the guys who run these top-flight English clubs are not necessarily England fans. Indeed, with the amount of cash in the English game, many of them are not even English. They do not care about England.

Greavsie was the best in his position in England in 1966 - none of today's England team can say that

For instance, if you were to pick a Best of English Football XI from 1966, when England won the World Cup at the very least Gordon Banks, Bobby Moore, Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Charlton and probably Ray Wilson would have been in that XI. Jim Baxter, Denis Law and Billy Bremner would have been the Scots' shoo-ins. Mike England of Wales would have been most people's pick at centre-half alongside Moore, while George Best would have been another shoo-in. That's ten of the team who would pick themselves, including five of the eventual England tournament squad.

If you picked a Best of English Football XI today, not one of the England squad in Russia would get into that team. You could not pick a Best of Spanish, Italian, German or French Football teams today without a large percentage of that team being genuinely Spanish, Italian, German or French.

And the situation is just as bad, if not worse, here in Scotland. I have watched the drip, drip announcements of new signings by our leading clubs – not many Scottish names among them.

Until the SFA forces our clubs to adopt a policy of having most of each match-day squad “Scottish-qualified”, we are not going to be going back to the World Cup or European Championship finals any time soon.

Of course, Brexit might change things. Without freedom of movement, it will not be as-easy for Scottish clubs to sign overseas players – however, I fear we will still see younger English players being sent up here on-loan to gain experience, at the expense of perhaps equally-talented Scottsh youngsters. Of course, if we become independent any time soon, that fact too will perhaps alter the signing playing field.

 GarethSouthgate is doing an impossible job rather well

But, all that is in the future. We still have Sunday's final, not forgetting Saturday's game nobody wants to play in – the third-place play-off, to get past. I feel sorry somewhat for Gareth Southgate and his men, who battled bravely, but came-up short. I genuinely like Southgate, but, he hopefully realises, he has indeed got the “impossible job”, trying to reconcile the realities of English football politics with the absolutely totally wrong-headed view the English media has of their current place in the football world.

England 2018 is not a shite football team, but, they are operating out of a shite football system. The same is true of Scotland, except, if anything our system is an even bigger pile of shite than England's.

Football will not be coming home to the island which fashioned it – until the systems, either side of the Solway and Tweed estuaries change.