AT TIMES like this, I don't half miss dear old David Francey. Nobody ever quite verbalised the hope that kills with following Scotland like David, when he uttered those immortal words: “Oh Deaer! Oh Dear! Oh Dear! It's disaster for Scotland” - followed by an in-depth surmation of whichever rush of shite to their brain any given ancestor of Grant Hanley had just perpetrated to help us snatch defeat from the jaws of either victory or at least a morale-boosting draw.
One of my journalist friends, a stalwart of that vanishing segment, local newspaper journalism, contacted me on Friday morning, suggesting he was keen to read what old Socrates had to say about that shit show against Poland on Thursday night.
I had to tell him, he had mistaken me for someone who still gave a shit about the failings of our national team – until such time as some footballing anarchist blows-up Hampden during a meeting of the SFA Congress, those quarterly meetings when most if not all the High Heid Yins of the various strata of our game are together inside Hampden – I am firmly on the sidelines channeling my inner Private Frazer.
Of course, the usual suspects were spouting the usual pish which follows a Scotland defeat; the same-old, same-old excuses and potential cures. One of my Facebook friends, himself a former Scotland intrnational in another sport, a now-retired former PE teacher and, to be honest, not a bad footballer in his youth, came up with some pish which was typical of the reaction.
According to this seemingly educated man: six years at a good Scottish Senior Secondary, four years at the Scottish School of Physical Education to qualify, a further year of teacher training, then some 40 years at the chalk face – the problem was:”The Manager needs to take-off his green-tinted specs”. If that's one view from the educated, Officer's Mess end of the Tartan Army, what might I hear from the PBI of that august body.
That particular gentleman, however, does view the game through red white and blue glasses, supporting a Scottish Football Institution where curtrently they do not have many players who are Rangers Class, far-less Scotland Class.
The reality is, we could at the peak of their powers Sir Matt Busby, Sir Alex Ferguson, Bob or Willie Shankly, Jock Stein or Bill Struth managing Scotland at the moment, and we would still be mince. The talent just isn't there and that's a fact.
Received wisdom has it, the basis of a successful football team is its spine: a good goalkeeper, a dominant centre half, a midfield general and a prolific striker. Think one of the first Scotland squads I ever got behind, when we had Bill Brown in goal, Billy McNeill or Ian Ure at centre-half, Jim Baxter and John White running things in midfield and Denis Law up front. The current Scotland squad has journeymen down the spine – where we need artists, it's that obvious.
It would be easy to sack Stevie Clarke and hand the poisoned chalice of the Scotland managership to someone like Davie Moyes, the current bookies choice, apparently, to be the next taxi off the rank; but, in reality, nothing would change. Clarke, Moyes, anyone else you might care to name, could only use the present-day talent pool, and at the moment, that pool is barely a puddle.
Ok, thanks to the likes of dear old Jimmy Greaves, Scottish goalkeepers have never had a good press. But, taking the need for a quality back-stop as one of the building blocks for that spine of the team, the outlook is bleak.
In last Saturday's Scottish Premier League team line-ups, the 12 goalkeepers used were Englishmen: Ellery Balcombe (St Mirren), Josef Bursik (Hibernian), Jack Butland (Rangers), Kieran O'Hara (Kilmarnock), Aston Oxborough (Motherwell) and Jack Walton (Dundee United), Scotsmen Craig Gordon (Heart of Midlothian), Ross Laidlaw (Ross County), John McCracken (Dundee) and Ross Sinclair (St Johnstone), plus Denmark's Kasper Schmeichel (Celtic) and Dimitar Mitov (Aberdeen).
So, that gives Clarke the choice of a mere one-third of the goalkeepers in his domestic top-flight. Gordon has been a wonderful servant to the national team, but, he is now in his forties, while the other three are all unproven at this level. The English Premiership, as it has been for most of this century, is barren of Scot4tish goalkeepers and the man who was handed the gloves on Thursday night – Angus Gunn, plays for what is currently the 33rd-best team in England.
Mindful of Willie Shankly's dictum that the secret of winning in England was to have enough Scots to make a difference, but not so-many that they fell-out, this sage advice appears now to be heresy to the increasing number of foreign managers down South. They simply do not appear to rate Scottish players these days, and this has been the situation for a while now.
Mind you, we don't appear to rate Scottish talent up here. Celtic has just announced its 25-man squad for this season's Champions League. Only eight of them are Scottish, and only two of those – skipper Callum McGregor and Greg Taylor are likely to start; with only another three – Luke McCowan, James Forrest and Anthony Ralston likely to get close to the bench.
That the club which famously won the European Cup with the only entirely home-born squad, nine of whom came through the club's development system should be reduced to being another home for badge-kissing mercenaries is a betrayal of its rich heritage and the passion of its core support.
But we cannot blame Celtic, after all, that club is currently owned by a non-Scot. But, we can blame the stumblebums who infest Hampden's sixth-floor “Corridor of Power” for being unwilling and seemingly unable to lift their snouts from the trough of entitlement they sup in to put right the many wrongs of the management of the game up here. I've been shouting for change for years, but, nobody who could make a difference is interested in so-doing.
The words of Private James Frazer, of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard still resonate across the ages of Scottish Football: We are all doomed, doomed I tell you.
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