SATURDAY was a good day for the (paper) roses, as Neil McCann and Billy Dodds got their first win as the Kilmarnock management team. This was a huge boost to all us worried Rugby Parkers, who had began to fear the tide would never turn. Now – hopefully – it's onwards and upwards in a spring surge.
I watched Hearts demolish Dundee United on TV on Saturday night. I have to say, they played some impressive fitba and thoroughly deserved their win. I couldn't help wondering what Jim McLean might have made of United's display – which was nothing short of disgraceful.
Their first red card was maybe unfortunate, but the second boy deserved to go for sheer stupidity. Clearly a “Dundee Kiss” has nothing like the velocity and sheer anger of the “Glasgow” version; however, he had to go for sheer stupidity. Mind you, had I been the referee, I would have been thinking of a yellow card for the Hearts' player – for “over-acting”.
Good to see age has not mellowed Dave Bowman, who was also red-carded. I have interviewed Dave, and you couldn't meet a nicer fellow, however, when the whistle blows, he still shows how he was deeply immersed in the Jim McLean culture.
FOLLOWING NEARLY a decade on the Paisley Daily Express Sports Desk, during which Love Street became almost a second home to me, I still, a quarter of a century on, have a soft spot for the Buddies.
Watching Saints squander chance after chance at home to Hearts on Tuesday night, I kept waiting for the ten-man visitors to break out and snatch a 1-0 win – that's a movie I have seen too often in the past. Never mind the Superstars – Gerry Baker, Gunni Torfason, Frank McAvennie, Frank McDougall or Frank McAvennie; with merely competent chance-takers such as Basher Lavety or Mark Yardley up front. In fact, I'd have backed the likes of Chris Iwelumo (pictured below) or even Junior Mendes to have had the Buddies home and hosed by half time.
However, in the end, Stephen Robertson got the win he desperately needed, even if, in the process, he added oxygen to the Championship hopes of the Bigot Brothers and made life a bit more difficult for my own redemption hopes for Kilmarnock.
ONE ASPECT of Tuesday night's game, which did concern me, was this: St Mirren only had two Scotsmen in their starting line-up, Hearts had four. This means, 72% - nearly three-quarters of the starters in a top-flight Scottish League game were non-Scots.
To my mind, a domestic league which allows this and a national governing body which allows that league to so ignore local talent is guilty of total dereliction of duty. These figures are a disgrace.
In my last wee piece above, I mentioned my near decade covering St Mirren, in that time, for all but a couple of seasons, the Buddies were in the old First Division, now The Championship; yet they still produced the following players for various Scottish age group teams (and apologies if I miss anyone out, I'm working from memory here):
Alan Combe, Derek Scrimgeour, Martin Baker, Chris Kerr, Sergei Baltacha, David McNamee, Burton O'Brien, Jamie Fullarton, Brian Hetherston, Hugh Murray, Steven McGarry, Chris Iwelumo, Ricky Gillies, and David Milne. They still had Basher at that time, plus Norrie McWhirter, perhaps the unluckiest player in Scottish football history in that injuries kept under-mining his undoubted class and talent.
The St Mirren team I covered had a central core of Paisley boys, this had always been the club's way. Today, a genuine Buddie in the squad is a rarity and for all their status as a top division club, I wonder if the home fans are truly happy with this situation.
I'm not having a go at Saints here, they are just one of too-many Scottish clubs who have decided to almost ignore native talent in a vain bid to close the gap on the Big Two. I think this buying in non-Scottish talent is the wrong tactics; what the other clubs should be doing is levelling-up the playing field by insisting on a CBA – a Collective Bargaining Agreement – by the rest getting together to stand up to the Big Two and by insisting on the implementation of Chick Young's Eight Diddies Rule – to pro-actively encourage native talent; then maybe we would be getting somewhere.
