A POST on Facebook earlier this week got me thinking. Someone mentioned the old County Cups – The Glasgow Cup, The Ayrshire Cup, The Renfrewshire Cup, The Lanarkshire Cup and so on – now, sadly, no longer played for.
There demise came about when the SFA dissolved the various County FAs and, in the West anyway, replaced them with the West of Scotland Football Association, whose founding secretary was the excellent Scott Struthers, then with Hamilton Academical.
I wrote at the time, and still feel, this was a chance missed – to initiate a West of Scotland Cup, similar to the Junior football version, which was the number two competition below the Scottish Junior Cup.
I thought the Senior version of the West could have been a great competition – perhaps run as a condensed competition at either the start or end of the season. It might have given the West of Scotland FA, on behalf of the SFA proper, to initiate new ideas.
For instance, imagine if the competition rules stated the clubs had to have seven or eight players, born in the West of Scotland, on the field at all times. This might encourage them to give local boys a chance to show what they could do.
Or make it an Under-23 competition (or use both constraints). I mentioned a condensed competition – this makes for an easily-organised event.
There are 17 senior clubs from the West of Scotland:
week one – preliminary round, team 16 v team 17.
week two – round of 16
week three – quarter-finals
week four – semi-finals
week five – the final.
Seed the draw according to how the teams finished the previous season, then let it rip. If we use the finishing positions of last season as a rough guide, had the West of Scotland Cup been competed for this season, the draw would have been:
Preliminary round: Albion Rovers v Annan Athletic
Round of 16:
Rangers v winners of the preliminary round
Morton v Stranraer
Queen of the South v Queen's Park
Hamilton Academical v Dumbarton
Kilmarnock v Clyde
Motherwell v Airdrie
St Mirren v Partick Thistle
Celtic v Ayr United
Quarter-finals:
Rangers v Hamilton Academical
Morton v Queen of the South
Kilmarnock v Motherwell
Celtic v St Mirren
Semi-finals:
Rangers v Morton
Celtic v Kilmarnock
Final:
Guess who?
In each game, I have assumed the home team will win, but, even allowing for a seeded draw, this cannot be taken as read. But, what's not to like about such a competition? And surely a similar competition could be held in the East of Scotland.
ASSUMING – and yes I know, you should never make assumptions about what might happen in Hampden's corridor of power – the game's high heid yins were to go for my left-field thinking, might we not see more young Scots playing in our top teams, and maybe improved results in Europe.
Here we are again, going into the group phases of the now three European competitions and, as always, Scotland's fate and our co-efficient is down to the two usual suspects.
They might give us a feeling of respectability, but, they represent a veneer of average competence, resting on shifting sands of incompetence.
The draw for the Group Stages of the three UEFA competitions were made today. Rangers were drawn to face Lyon from France, Sparta Prague from the Czech Republic and Brondby from Denmark. Celtic were drawn with Germany's Bayer Leverkusen, Spain's Real Betis and Hungary's Ferencvaros.
The draws involved 96 clubs. So, where does our league lie in the European pecking order?
To try to ascertain our current position, I adapted the Olympic medal table protocol. If you like, The Champions League is the gold standard, the Europa League silver and the Conference League bronze.
This gave me a “medal table” which looked like this:
Spain 5 – 2 – 0
England 4 – 2 – 1
Italy 4 – 2 – 1
Germany 4 – 2 – 1
France 2 – 3 – 1
Belgium 1 – 3 – 2
Netherlands 1 – 1 – 3
Portugal 3 – 1 – 0
Austria 1 – 2 – 1
Denmark 0 – 2 – 2
Ukraine 2 – 0 – 1
Russia 1 – 2 – 0
Turkey 1 – 2 – 0
Czech Republic 0 – 1 – 2
Switzerland 1 – 0 – 1
Scotland 0 – 2 – 0
Greece 0 – 1 – 1
Serbia 0 – 1 – 1
Cyprus 0 – 0 – 2
Israel 0 – 0 – 2
Sweden 1 – 0 – 0
Croatia 0 – 1 – 0
Hungary 0 – 1 – 0
Poland 0 – 1 – 0
Armenia 0 – 0 - 1
Estonia 0 – 0 - 1
Finland 0 – 0 - 1
Gibraltar 0 – 0 – 1
Kazakstan 0 – 0 - 1
Norway 0 – 0 – 1
Romania 0 – 0 - 1
Slovakia 0 – 0 - 1
Slovenia 0 – 0 – 1
That list involves clubs from 33 of the 54 UEFA member leagues. It shows, we are (just) in the top half of the leagues who managed to get at least one team into the group stages of one of the three European competitions, and in the top third of all the European leagues.
OK, we perhaps cannot realistically compete with the top European leagues – Spain, England, Italy, Germany and France. But, Belgium can get six clubs through to the group stages in Europe, The Netherlands five, Austria and |Denmark four each. Surely we should be upsides with these nations, at the very least.
Is there nobody along that sixth-floor corridor at Hampden looking at these qualification results and asking: “Why are we not doing better?” “Are we happy with how we are doing in Europe?” Or: “What should we be doing that we are not, to get more of our clubs going deeper into the European season?”
I believe, until we ask these questions, and answer them adequately, we are going nowhere, other than down the stank.
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