Who's Next For Mission Impossible?

ONCE AGAIN, as Alex McLeish joins the long line of sacked Scotland managers, the real culprits in the nation which gave football shape's plunge into insignificance appear to be getting off Scot free.

 Alex McLeish has gone - who's next?

The stumble bums, time-servers, numpties and clowns who make the big decisions in their sixth-floor lair at Hampden will assure us: “Lessons will be learned, we will scour the world for the right man to get Scotland back to where we want to be.....blah de blah de blah de blah. The reality is, not a lot will happen and we will continue to be among the also-rans of world football.

I have written this before, and will doubtless do so again, but, the fact is the overall FIFA rankings do not matter a jot, what does matter is our European ranking.

Right now, Scotland is ranked 44 in the world, 26 in Europe. Let me put it this way, Scotland is the Montrose of European international football, except, with the best will in the world, the Gable Endies have never been anything other than make weights and also-rans in our national game. Time was, we mattered in the game – this is no longer the case.

Results under McLeish were unsatisfactory, well, take a look at these tables:

Table One

Manager	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	Wins %
Ormond	12	9	2	1	75
Stein 2	12	7	2	3	58.3
Docherty	12	7	2	3	58.3
McColl	12	6	3	3	50
C Brown	12	5	5	2	41.7
Levein	12	5	4	3	41.7
Strachan	12	5	4	3	41.7
McLeish 2	12	5	0	7	41.7
Roxburgh	12	4	3	5	33.3
MacLeod	12	4	3	5	33.3
Vogts	12	3	3	6	25
Beattie 2	12	3	3	6	25
Burley	12	3	2	7	25
B Brown	12	2	3	7	16.7

Table Two

Season	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	Wins %
2009-10	6	2	0	4	33.3
2010-11	10	4	1	5	40
2011-12	8	4	2	2	50
2012-13	10	4	2	4	40
2013-14	7	3	2	2	42.9
2014-15	9	5	2	2	55.6
2015-16	8	3	1	4	37.5
2016-17	7	2	3	2	28.6
2017-18	9	4	1	4	44.4
2018-19	8	4	0	4	50
Decade	82	35	14	33	42.7

Table Three

Decade	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	Wins %
1950s	67	32	16	19	47.8
1960s	63	29	13	21	46
2010s	82	35	14	33	42.7
1970s	88	37	19	32	42.1
1990s	89	37	22	30	41.6
1940s	17	7	3	7	41.2
1980s	88	35	25	28	39.8
2000s	85	33	20	32	38.8
Post WW2	579	245	132	202	42.3

Table One, above, is a league table of the results of the final 12 games (the number of matches Alex McLeish had as National Team Manager during his second spell in the job), those Scotland team managers who have been in charge for that, or a greater number of games.

In that table, McLeish is in joint fifth place when it comes to his wins percentage over that 12 game period. By the way, the average wins percentage for the 14 managers in he table is 40.1%.

 Willie Ormond

Willie Ormond comfortably tops that table, however, the first of Willie's last dozen games, was the 1-1 draw with Romania in Bucharest, in June, 1975. This game saw Willie Miller's debut and was our first match after: “Stewart Kennedy's Match,” the 1-5 Wembley loss to England. On the back of those two results, some of the “Fans With Typewriters” were calling for Willie to be sacked, and the SFA International Committee of the time is understood to have discussed the manager's position, before sticking with Willie.

Table Two shows Scotland's wins percentage over the past decade. McLeish has been sacked because we are having a poor season – a perception caused by two losses, to Israel and Kazakhstan, yet, it is our joint second winningest season (sorry to use that Americanism) in the decade. On that basis, sacking McLeish makes little sense.

Table Three shows our wins percentage over the eight decades since the end of World War 2, and looking at that table, the current decade, when we are supposedly a a low ebb, is actually our third-most-successful decade in those eight periods.

Sure, we were terrible in the first decade of this third millennium, but, we are turning the corner. Over the current decade, we have actually won more games than we did in the supposedly golden decade of the 1970s. We are winning more games than we did in the 1980s, when we qualified for three World Cup Finals, and in the 1990s, when we went to two European Championships and one World Cup Final tournaments.

The fact is, we have been average since at least the end of World War 2. But, we refuse to believe this to be fact. We continue to see ourselves as a great football nation, which we obviously are not, and have not been since before Germany marched into Poland in 1939.

Sacking Alex McLeish might be the right thing to do, but, I have my doubts. Because, there are no guarantees that whoever is next to pick-up the poisoned chalice of carrying the unrealistic football hopes of the nation, can lift us out of the slough of poor performances which have sucked us down for decades.

And, the best, perhaps the only means by which we can do this, is to renew things, beginning with a cull of the numpties along the sixth floor corridor at Hampden.

I said at the start of this post, that Scotland was the Montrose of European international football; that is maybe a bit unfair on Montrose, since they have been promoted in the recent past and have modernised Links Park to the extent of installing a 3G pitch. Modernising is something Hampden does not appear to do well. Also, in this, their 140^th year, the Gable Endies have promotion ambitions via the end-of-season play-offs.

Can we be sure there is any ambition beyond keeping their own noses in the trough, along that sixth-floor Hampden corridor?

Montrose's Chairman John Crawford and his fellow directors, manager Stewart Petrie and the players, and their hardy but small body of devoted fans all want the best for their club, but, in my honest opinion, with all due respect to them, is that clubs such as Montrose have no place in “Senior” football.

True 'Senior' clubs should meet certain standards as to:

• an all-seater stadium of a certain minimum size
  
  
• they should be full-time
  
  
• their coaches and managers should have minimum, industry-recognised qualifications.

Clubs such as Montrose should be 'Communiy Clubs' – concentrating on developing young, local talent to be fed into the 'Senior' ranks, but playing in a minor rather than the major Scottish League. There is maybe a case for an American-style system whereby clubs like Montrose are tied to a bigger club as a feeder side, where young talent can develop.

We need to be looking at the overall structure of our game, or, the guy who takes over from McLeish will – because that structure is wrong – be no closer to reuniting the Scotland support with the joys of being at the Big Show: World Cup and European Championships Finals, than any of the five full-time managers the SFA has employed over the 21 years, 11 qualifying campaigns and 102 qualifying games since 23 June, 1989, our last match on football's biggest stage, that bad loss to Morocco.

Six players: Kenny Miller, Gary Caldwell, Darren Fletcher, Scot Brown, Alan Hutton and Craig Gordon have all, during these fallow years on the outside looking in, amassed 50 caps, but never got to strut their stuff on the biggest stage of all.

They, and the fans who wished to go and watch them there were not so-much let down by various sacked managers, but by a system of governing the game and men at the very top who, quite clearly, were not fit for purpose.

It is past time for a change, not of manager, but of culture and top officials.