Somewhere in Hampden Park, the stadium with the world’s largest administration and executive suite, there is a secret chamber called the Blueprint Room.
You are only allowed to enter it if you are cleared at the highest level of security and once you have secured ingress you must immediately slip your hands into a pair of white velvet gloves. Only then are you allowed to handle the merchandise, as it were. In centuries to come, social historians will stumble upon this room and, once they have read its contents, will exclaim: “Truly, this Scotia must have been the greatest football nation in the world.”
This is the room where, every five to 10 years or so, the latest Blueprint for Saving Scottish football is lovingly embalmed and stored, never to be seen again. Scotland found its road to football perdition many decades ago and has spent the time since trying to find the road back out. And this place is where all the failed attempts lie.
In there is to be found the fabled Rinus Michels Manuscript. The SFA commissioned it back in the early 1990s, on the basis that Michels was an old Dutch Master who is regarded as the Father of Total Football. In Scottish football, we confer the title of “Master” on any Dutchman who can kick with either foot.
Many years later, there was the McLeish Memorandum. Henry McLeish, on the basis that he once played for East Fife and was first minister for a couple of minutes, was tasked with studying how mince we are at football and drawing up a road map out of the ordure. It should be mentioned that McLeish was brought up on the progressive style of football favoured by the Methil men that brought them the 1938 Scottish Cup and a few League Cups after the war.
In between, there have been lesser works by the likes of Andy Roxburgh and Craig Brown, said to contain theorems linking aptitude at snakes and ladders on the team bus to excellence on the football field. There is even rumoured to be a document from the pen of William Wallace that advocated the kidnapping of English maidens to entice Albion’s stoutest yeomen north in an early attempt to reverse the talent drain from Scotland to the English First Division.
I like to imagine an assortment of mustachioed and thin-lipped Scottish football administrators (of the sort in which the nation has always shown fecundity) such as Ernie Walker and James Farry, locking the door quietly after the latest Blueprint for Recovery has been presented and whispering: “Aye, right.” They would be holding them disdainfully between thumb and forefinger as they might a shoddily written homework exercise.
Now Gordon Strachan, the head coach of Scotland’s international football team, is getting into the Blueprint malarkey. This is to be called the Strachan Thesis and, to be fair, the coach will have a pretty free diary for the task of completing it. This is because Scotland, alone of the five nations of the British Isles, failed to qualify for a European Championship Finals that will also include Greece and Iceland.
I’m not saying that Strachan isn’t qualified to write the latest recovery blueprint, and I’m sure it will be given a prominent shelf in the Blueprint Room. His team was genuinely unlucky not to progress from the toughest group in the qualifying series, during which we had great moments against Germany and were more than a match for the Robert Lewandowski-inspired Poles. I’m sure there will be some blue-sky thinking in it, as well as achievable outcomes and sustainable benefits and all that. But come on, Gordon; you’re dealing with an organisation that specialises in looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Unfortunately, if Strachan has been quoted correctly, he seems to have succumbed to the daft We Just Don’t Produce The Players Any More theory. This is the one that suggests that, for some reason, in the 1980s, perhaps due to a slight cosmic flutter, we stopped producing footballers who could thread passes through the eyes of needles and instead started producing ones who couldn’t trap a bag of cement and who needed satnavs to find the 18-yard box.
In the medieval world of Scottish football, there’s nothing like rewriting the laws of natural selection to suit a theory. The presence of the richest league in the world next door to Scotland and its decision to shop for custom-built Ferraris in Europe’s showrooms rather than capture and nurture raw Scottish talent is the main reason why gifted young Scottish footballers wither and die in the factory version of the game we play here.
It doesn’t help, either, that your two principal football clubs are run by executives who are graduates of the Gerald Ratner École of Business Studies. This has never been more apparent than in the last four years, when, free from the pressure of having to beat each other five or six times a season, they blew the opportunity to blood native, young Scottish talent.
What money Rangers had left after feeding the vultures that have preyed on them in recent seasons they squandered on fading divas. Celtic, meanwhile, have become world football’s favourite pension fund, giving house room to dozens of European players of uncertain provenance in the hope they can make a killing on one or two. The best of their young Scottish players are invariably to be found helping their SPL rivals avoid relegation. It is a wretched way to run a football club.
So here’s a little suggestion, offered in a spirit of devotion to my beloved country. Couldn’t we perhaps give grants to disadvantaged state schools that could aspire to become academies of football excellence? This would allow them to build facilities that are now commonly the preserve of fee-paying schools. Tax breaks and larger slices of television rights would be given to those of Scotland’s senior clubs willing to partner with these schools. They certainly couldn’t be doing any worse than the grand football academies being run by our two biggest clubs and which are demonstrably not fit for purpose.
The money would come from clawing back the unpaid taxes from private schools that specialise in rugby, a boutique pastime that fewer than 20 nations take seriously.
