I HAVE long thought football's law book badly needs a total re-write. Let's take one simple fact of life – the yellow card. In Rugby Union, you receive a yellow card, you're on the naughty step and your team has to manage without you for ten minutes.
Imagine if that ruling came into football, in a lot of games, it would mostly be seven against five. For all the plethora of yellow cards you see in some games, the players don't seem to learn from the slight slap on the wrist which a yellow card has become. Send the player receiving the card to the sin bin, watch the space open up and the goals flow.
I reckon if yellow cards carried the ten-minute sanction, player behaviour would quickly improve.
These thoughts came to mind as I watched last night's Georgia v Scotland game. We here are notoriously hard on our own referees and their inadequacies. Going by the performance of last night's referee, things are a lot worse in North Macedonia.
To be honest, he let the Georgians away with murder, he was far too soft and it was annoying to see Scottish players being booked for challenges which their opponents got away with – but, that's European football, where the visitors seldom get a fair deal, unless they are one of the big guns.
Given our past record in Tbilisi, I was quite happy with the draw. On another night, we might have won it; there again, on another night, given how short we were of “automatic choices” we might have lost.
However, the reality is, this was a dead rubber”. The result could make no difference to the group; Spain and Scotland will qualify, only the final order has to be settled.
It was a chance for Steve Clarke to try a few things – which certainly worked-out for goal-scoring hero Lawrence Shankland. After his late equaliser, provided he keeps scoring at club level, Shankland has surely pushed himself a lot further up the pecking order when it comes to likely members of the eventual squad in Germany next summer.
Much of the post-game chat was around Scott McTominay's comments on the Georgian players. Their acting was so bad, even Ronald Villiers was embarrassed for them. A half-decent referee would have had of them off the par for “simulation.”
You wonder how some of today's players would have got on against old-style Scottish midfielders such as Dave Mackay or John Greig. The Georgians would have had to change their shorts colour to brown, I reckon.
Now we move on to another dead rubber, against Norway, on Sunday. Except, there are still things to play for in this game. For Scotland, a two-goal win would take us above Austria and into Pot 2 for the draw for Germany next year.
Norway's need for victory is less clear-cut, even if they do beat us, there is no guarantee they will have done enough to make up the ground they lost in the Europa Nations League games; so, for them it's a case of beat the Scots and hope that's enough.
Steve Clarke might well have hoped he had enough leeway come this final game to play around with his formation and try a few more of his fringe players, however, given our injury situation and the desire to win and get into Pot 2, you can expect him to play his strongest-possible team.
FURTHER to my recent post on the inadequacies of the current football-writing in Scotland – I see those two intellectual giants Mr Christopher Sutton and Mr Kris Boyd have been exchanging pleasantries across a Sky TV round table.
When the Scottish School of Physical Education at Jordanhill College used to train the future 'Gymmies' for Scottish schools, new entrants each year were given a number – assigned alphabetically; this practice encouraged teaching folklore – that they Gymmies wore their IQ on their back.
Extrapolating this to football, both Messrs Boyd and Sutton wore number nine on their back, which some might say, in IQ terms is being guilty of exaggeration. Whatever, so long as they encourage the gullible to respond to their 'clickbait' verbal sparring and moved to comment online, their employers at The Hun, The Daily Rhebel and Sly Sport will no doubt encourage the bold brace to keep on doing what they do.
I've said it before and will no doubt say it again, the quicker the mainstream media escapes from its current culture of allowing big-name retired “stars” to set the agenda for its sports coverage and gets back to encouraging competent journalists to point out the inadequacies of the high heid yins of sport, and question their decisions, the better.
Cynic that I am, I have a vision of Boyd and Sutton meeting somewhere quiet and well away from prying eyes, every Monday morning, to work out what they are going to fall out about this week.
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