IN FINE WINES, here are good years, bad years and great years. The current crop of Celtic players are perhaps closer to the vintages offered alongside Tesco's week-end meal deals than the Premier Cru vintage of 1967, while the current Rangers lot are barely Buckfast class – and that's why Celtic will be facing St Mirren in this season's League Cup Final.
But, if the players on the park are but a tribute act to the clubs' stories pasts, the refereeing team on and off the park on Sunday were but a shadow of the standards set by Scotland's great whistlers of legend.
If a Rugby Union player had kicked an opponent on the head, as carelessly as Celtic's Auston Trusty kicked Jack Butland – he'd certainly have received a ten-minute seat on the naughty stool, more-likely a yellow card with the mitigation that the offence would have gone to the FPRO (Fair Play Review Officer) in “The Bunker” who would have had the final word on whether the punishment remained at yellow, or was upgraded to a 20-minute red card, which would mean his team playing that long a man short before he was replaced by another player.
I have long said, given how Football collisions tend to be more dynamic, if perhaps less of a thump than collisions in Rugby Union, The Beautiful Game ought to be bringing in five and ten minute yellows and 20-minute red cards; I think such action would go a long way towards cleaning-up the game's on-field antics.
However, I digress; yes, Trusty was yellow-carded for his stray boot, but, he dodged a bullet. In Rugby, the kick might well have brought the intervention of the Citing Commissioner post-game, to decide if, in not red-carding him, Nick Walsh, who had a very uneven performance, had boobed.
But, not dismissing Trusty wasn't the reason Rangers lost. For all their energy, they simply don't have as many players of even competent journeymen class as Celtic – their recruiters are going to be busy both in January and in the Summer. The club needs to find a lot of better players, while they have the additional problem of unloading the dross the current management team has inherited.
NO REST for either team, however, with Celtic off to Denmark in midweek, to face FC Midtjylland while Rangers entertain FC Roma in their respective Europa League games.
Of the two, Rangers have the tougher task, they will need 90 minutes of the sort of football they produced in flashes on Sunday, if they are to vanquish the Italian giants.
Aberdeen are also in Europe this week, off to Cyprus to face AEK Larnaca in the Conference League. Once upon a time, a team going through as desperate a run as the Dons currently are would be looking forward to a few days in Cyprus, confident of a comfortable win and some late Autumn sun. Not so these days, I can see some more pain for the currently not so dandy Dons.
OLD JIMMY GREAVES, wonderful man, fantastic striker and great TV personality though he was, did Scottish goalkeepers no favours by almost single-handedly persuading the world our back stops: couldnae keep hens oot o' a close – to use that old Glasgow put down. We have had some world-class shot-stoppers, while, if I could be bothered slagging-off my fellow members of Football's glove-wearing class, I could name one or two England number ones who came nowhere close to the status accorded them by their sycophantic press.
My wonderful dear old mate Roughie came in for some ignorant abuse from English hacks during his career. Well, the shots which left him flat-footed at World level tended to come from South American maestroes, he never let one through his legs at Hampden, or was out-jumped by a five foot nothing coke-head, as happened to two of England's most-celebrated keepers.
But, as witnessed by Stevie Clarke's latest Scotland squad – we have a problem at the back. For the crucial upcoming World Cup qualifiers, he has named three goalkeepers: Scott Bain of Falkirk, the seemingly-eternal Craig Gordon of Hearts and Liam Kelly of Rangers.
Of that trio, only Bain is currently first-choice for his club, and playing well I should add. Gordon will be most Tartan Army foot soldier's choice to fill the gap caused by Angus Gunn's absence from the squad through injury, but, while big Craig will always be in the conversation around who is our best-ever goalkeeper, he is now closer to his pension than his first contract, and no longer first-choice at his club.
Kelly is also the back-up at club level, and given both he and Bain lack international experience, going into a game which we dare not lose, and ideally want to win – playing Kelly or Bain could be a gamble too-far – not that Sir Stevie is much of a gambler.
What has happened to the supply chain of home-grown goalkeepers? Of the 12 first-choice goalkeepers in the top flight of the Scottish Professional Football League, only two – Bain at Falkirk and Dundee's Jon McCracken are Scottish. Of the other ten, four are English, the others are from Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany and Ukraine.
The shortage of Scottish goalkeepers is perhaps the worst example of the fact, our professional clubs have stopped believing in home-grown talent and until somebody inside Hampden grows a pair and forces the stumble-bums who run our game to believe in Scottish players, we are going nowhere but down the stank.
Bring-in an “eight diddies rule” - NOW.
