Guardian/Observer’s take on SPFL

[Bobby14]

This article was posted on The Guardians website on the 17th of November.

I thought there was a feel good factor about Scottish football at the moment, with 4 big name managers and 5/6 teams currently challenging for top spot. When this is the write up our game gets in a national newspaper by a Scottish journo, I can begin to see why our league is treated with such contempt in England. 

Scottish football, a Jurassic world where ancient species thrive | Kevin McKenna

Things are so bad for the national side it’s becoming a struggle to find 11 fit players who actually want to wear the shirt

A new form of football seems to have evolved in Scotland during our 20 years of wandering in the game’s wilderness.

On closer scrutiny, it bears curious similarities to some of those recently discovered islands in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific which are found to have sprouted their own unique ecosystems. In these places some of the accepted norms of biological science appear to have been happily defied in the passing of millennia. The passage of time, though, is no match for David Attenborough and his camera crew – and these remote islands, like all living things, must eventually succumb to the great TV explorer when he rocks up for a wee look.

As he enters his tenth decade on planet Earth, Attenborough could fill his Dubarrys with the way football in Scotland has regressed into a kind of Jurassic form of the beautiful game. Exotic species, once considered extinct, are flourishing. Ancient behaviours, formerly associated with a more savage era, are thriving. It’s as if our two decades in international exile have left us untouched by progressive developments elsewhere.

I now encounter a degree of disorientation when I settle down to watch another World Cup or European Championship. It’s got to the stage where the television companies ought to consider screening a special tournament guide for viewers in Scotland to inform us of developments that seem to have passed us by.

We would get to discover that tackles from behind have been banned in the outside world and that attempts to maim and cause life-changing injuries can be met with an instant red card. After this we can better appreciate why skilful players are free to display their artistry unhindered by the fear of being stookied by the hulking Rabs and Tams who are still permitted to maraud hither and thon across the killing fields of Scottish football. We would also find out that international football is played on smooth, natural surfaces made of grass, having dispensed with the cheap experiment of plastic pitches.

Just as Scottish footballers have become an extinct species at these international gatherings, so have Scottish referees. Very soon a scientific study will evaluate early career mortality rates among players who have suffered prolonged exposure to Scottish football surfaces, tactics and refs. Reports of missing limbs, scalpings and testicular violation will be studied.

In Scottish football’s so-called elite professional league, a quarter of the clubs are permitted to use artificial surfaces. Nor are these the artificial, hybrid surfaces on which clubs in the outside world fuse nature and science to pleasing effect. Oh no; these are Scottish artificial surfaces, which after exposure to a single weather cycle begin to resemble the carpets in a facility for abandoned dogs. All attempts at recruiting skilful overseas footballers and adopting an expansive ground-based game are rendered useless. Lacking an artificial surface of their own, the club who currently occupy second place in Scotland’s elite league have taken to keeping the grass deliberately long to inhibit the progress of skilful players.

In football’s developed world (basically every country furth of Scotland), players know that to make a challenge that endangers an opponent will result in instant dismissal. In Scotland there often has to be blood, brain tissue or exposed internal organs before a ref considers the ultimate sanction.

Scottish clubs participating in European tournaments are put at an immediate disadvantage. In the 1960s and 1970s, when even the most sophisticated teams had their on-field assassins and hatchetmen, Scottish clubs regularly held their own and reached the latter stages. The best Scottish clubs, having had to devise a strategy for most of the year principally aimed at handling an SAS training course, now find they are literally playing a different game with different rules.

Scottish football commentators choose to reach for the excuse that our game can’t compete with the money available in Europe’s big five leagues. This isn’t the problem though. Our clubs and players can’t compete with ordinary teams in the 40-odd other leagues below England, Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Some of the top European clubs and agents have been attracted by Celtic’s reputation for successfully developing young overseas talent. But they have to weigh up the risks of their prodigies being exposed to an exceedingly primitive form of the game.

European football’s governing body Uefa still harbours a residual fondness for Scotland’s pioneering role in developing the game. Thus, they have gone to extraordinary lengths to make their flagship international tournament, the European Championship, so easy to reach that even Scotland could catch a bus to it. Scotland still keep missing it. For 2020 they have devised a complicated system that virtually ensures qualification for any country whose players can successfully tie their own bootlaces. Predictably, Scotland are making it into an ordeal, as demonstrated by last month’s abject defeat to Israel, ranked 91 in the world.

Before tonight’s game in Albania, nine players were unavailable for selection. Only a few of them were injured. There seems to be a dawning realisation among some Scottish footballers that, in terms of their careers, representing your country can be bad for your health. Those of us forced to watch Scottish football every week came to that realisation a long time ago.

• Kevin McKenna

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/17/football-hampden-roar-scotland-plastic-pitches

[fraz65]

We all know that Scottish football isn't very good. The reasons for this are more complex than bad tackling and plastic pitches.

At best, this is heavy-handed satire with a flawed basic premise from a former Daily Mail editor. 

[red_dug]

For all its faults scottish football is every bit as watchable as any other. At least it is for me.

Is Kevin McKenna on work experience?

[NorfolkG]

Scottish football has been improving the last couple of years. This guy seems to be conflating the senior international team, international youth teams, the various leagues and all coaching.

Irrespective though, the main stream media is the entity about to be fossilised. I don’t agree with his slightly poisonous take but I don’t really care.

This is the bit BT did well - talking up the game and covering it respectfully, helping mould public perception.

 

Edited November 20, 2018 by NorfolkG

[Beaker71]

Mckenna like most so called Scottish journalists who work down in London believe the only way to ingratiate themselves win their bosses is to denigrate anything Scottish.  Has this arsehat actually studied the game up here this season or last or the general increase in competitiveness over the past few years?

Most likely he just watches the overhyped EPL and believes their own press as being the self appointed best at everything.

Needs to take his head out their arse and actually do some research.

Tosspot  of the highest order whose article above is dropping with sarcastic anti Scots rhetoric which isn't even worthy of wrapping chips in.

Edited November 20, 2018 by Beaker71

[red_dug]

Be interetesting to see how good the EPL is once streaming kills off their tv deals.

Sadly most if not all of scottish tv subscriptions will be helping to widen the gulf in finance between the leagues.

[mitch14]

Always worth ignoring McKenna. All the funnier that he posted it just before the Albania win. Ewan Murray writes some good stuff talking up the league. 

[gdevoy]

Very amusing.....not. Satire simply providing the confirmation bias sought by his readers.

There are some problems with the Scottish game and lack of cash could be singled out although that may be seen as an advantage in a way. The biggest problem for me is the "Blazers" mentality of the organising structure. More interested in their position in the hierarchy than in the quality of Scottish football. Until that goes nothing will change.

He's got a point about the Astroturf though.

  

[Scooby_Doo]

Scottish National team ≠ Scottish football. 

[Scooby_Doo]

1 hour ago, gdevoy said:

He's got a point about the Astroturf though.

Has he? 

"Oh no; these are Scottish artificial surfaces, which after exposure to a single weather cycle begin to resemble the carpets in a facility for abandoned dogs." 

Lets have a look at the state of all the grass pitches in about three weeks time shall we? I think they will also match his description. 

Apart from Celtic, who have pretty much more money than everyone else combined. But, of course, he says it isn't just about money. 

[Dillinger]

Reading that, it sounds like it was written by a dinosaur. He seems completely out of touch with what's happening here. 

[skygod]

To say that football supporters in Scotland are intrinsically pessimistic about the country’s football prospects is not entirely accurate – we have simply become fearful of optimism.

In the 20 years that have elapsed since Scotland last qualified for a major international championship, we have grabbed at any small signals that might indicate we were about to reach the Promised Land. Perhaps we are being punished for making graven images of football and its princes and for allowing it to play a disproportionately important role in our existences.

Thus, I’m fearful of the sense of hope that perhaps our two decades of wandering in the desert might be about to end. In other nations that embrace this capricious game, hope is seen as a positive force, something that sustains you during times of adversity. In Scotland, we have come to despise it because it always ends in disappointment. And yet…

In Rome last week, we witnessed Andrew Robertson, a 24-year-old Glaswegian full-back play a vital role for Liverpool in Rome as they reached the final of the Champions League for the first time since 2007. On 26 May in Kiev, he will become the first Scot to play in one of the biggest sporting events on the planet since Paul Lambert helped Borussia Dortmund to a 3-1 win against Juventus in Munich in 1997. The year after Lambert’s feat, Scotland reached the World Cup finals in France. Could Robertson’s displays 21 years later presage our return from the international wilderness? Or is this merely another wretched symptom of the madness that has taken a hold of our souls?

There have been other signs and wonders. One has been the emergence in the Manchester United midfield of Scott McTominay, who qualifies to play for Scotland by dint of having a Scottish father. This 21-year-old isn’t one of those Anglo-Scots who has grasped at the chance of international football under a flag of convenience in the knowledge that he’ll never play for England. McTominay is a thoroughbred who possesses the talents to become a future English international. Yet he chose Scotland because that’s what his heart was telling him. Is this another sign?

In Scottish club football, something else has been happening that may contain the seeds of optimism. Celtic, which won the Scottish title by defeating Rangers 5-0, had seven Scots on the park at the end of the game. Three others were either injured or on the substitutes’ bench. This is generally regarded as the best Celtic team since the era of the Lisbon Lions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The tribulations and self-inflicted wounds that led to the liquidation of Rangers in 2012 still beset this massive club. Their capitulation to Celtic last week followed a 4-0 defeat to them in the Scottish Cup two weeks earlier. Rangers have never been weaker. Steven Gerrard, whose only experience of coaching has been a few months in charge of Liverpool’s under-18s, is expected to halt Rangers’ second slide into the abyss. He will need upwards of £20m even to be in the same room as Celtic, a sum that Rangers cannot produce under their own steam.

The downfall of Rangers has led many Scottish football pundits to express their dismay at the adverse effect this has had on the wider game. In the history of Scottish football, the statement “Scotland needs a strong Rangers” has been deployed as often as “hoof the ball up the park”. This is partly true, but not in the way its acolytes intend. Certainly, a strong Rangers is better than a weak one, in the same way that a strong Partick Thistle is better than a weak one. However, to suggest that Scottish football has been weakened by Rangers’ troubles is questionable.

In the six seasons since Rangers went into liquidation, Aberdeen, Hibs, Hearts, St Mirren, Ross County, St Johnstone and Inverness Caledonian Thistle have all lifted silverware. Several of those clubs have either improved their stadiums or are in the process of doing so. They have used their success wisely by resisting the urge to take shortcuts to unsustainable success. In the Scottish Premiership, Aberdeen, Hibs, Motherwell and Kilmarnock have managed to assemble strong teams under young and modern managers and with a scattering of talented young Scots.

Hibs were the first British club to compete in the European Cup in 1955-56 and progressed to the semi-finals. The current side, under the tutelage of Neil Lennon, is the best that Edinburgh has seen for almost 50 years. The week before Celtic annihilated Rangers they were cleanly beaten by a Hibs side in which the best players were all young Scots. They were fast, fit, skilful and better than Celtic.

The worst nightmare for Rangers supporters is Celtic achieving a landmark 10 successive league titles, thus eclipsing the current record of nine jointly held by each. Nor would this say much that is positive about Scottish football’s competitiveness (though Bayern Munich are well on the way to making it 10 Bundesligas in a row). If the Hibs board can resist the urge of previous administrations and attempt to hang on to its brightest and best for another season or two, then Neil Lennon may become the unlikely slayer of Rangers fans’ scariest demons.

Steven Gerrard may yet become the man to steer Rangers out of the doldrums but Lennon, who always flourishes in adversity, has everything they lack.

(Kevin McKenna, 20 May 2018)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/do-not-laugh-scottish-football-on-the-rise

 

 

Edited November 20, 2018 by skygod

[Wrangodog]

25 minutes ago, Scooby_Doo said:

Has he? 

"Oh no; these are Scottish artificial surfaces, which after exposure to a single weather cycle begin to resemble the carpets in a facility for abandoned dogs." 

Lets have a look at the state of all the grass pitches in about three weeks time shall we? I think they will also match his description. 

Apart from Celtic, who have pretty much more money than everyone else combined. But, of course, he says it isn't just about money. 

Hearts have a hybrid pitch too and it looked fantastic when we played them.

[Nobody]

Just a load of crap from a lazy guy that has fallen out of love with the game in general.

I don't understand why guys with this kind of platform don't go for the corruption and bias of the SFA and SPFL and the criminal (in some cases literally) decisions twats like Doncaster cook up - rather than just go for a cheap cartoonish caricature of Scottish football from 40 years ago.

That would actually be a real story that might lead to "real news" when Doncaster and his mates are up in Court.

But as a pal of former SPL bosses like the physical and intellectual pygmy "wee Rodge", McKenna is maybe too close to these f**kwits to point the finger

[gdevoy]

1 hour ago, Scooby_Doo said:

Has he? 

"Oh no; these are Scottish artificial surfaces, which after exposure to a single weather cycle begin to resemble the carpets in a facility for abandoned dogs." 

Lets have a look at the state of all the grass pitches in about three weeks time shall we? I think they will also match his description. 

Apart from Celtic, who have pretty much more money than everyone else combined. But, of course, he says it isn't just about money. 

Yes he has.

Grass pitches, where a club doesn't have the resources to look after it properly will look like utter crap after some bad weather but they will recover in better weather. After a Scottish season's weathering every artificial surface I have seen  looks exactly like a carpet in a facility for abandoned dogs. And will continue to look like that until it is replaced. It is a complete embarrassment. 

[Scooby_Doo]

2 hours ago, gdevoy said:

Grass pitches, where a club doesn't have the resources to look after it properly will look like utter crap after some bad weather but they will recover in better weather. 

They look great in August. And May. When there is 'better weather'. 

The rest of the time they are not in great nick and don't play well. Remember he is talking about all of Scottish football, not just the top clubs. 

The ones that don't have great grass pitches year round are, unsurprisingly the ones without the money to keep them going year round. 

[skygod]

2 hours ago, Scooby_Doo said:

Remember he is talking about all of Scottish football, not just the top clubs. 

It seems to me that he is just talking about the Premiership clubs:

"In Scottish football’s so-called elite professional league, a quarter of the clubs are permitted to use artificial surfaces. Nor are these the artificial, hybrid surfaces on which clubs in the outside world fuse nature and science to pleasing effect. Oh no; these are Scottish artificial surfaces, which after exposure to a single weather cycle begin to resemble the carpets in a facility for abandoned dogs."

There is, I think, thirteen clubs out of 42 in the SPFL with artificial pitches.

 

 

Edited November 20, 2018 by skygod

[aldo]

sounds like just another self loathing scot, putting down his own country to ingratiate himself to his English masters. no shortage of them about unfortunately

[bute-killiefan]

We are s**te because we let any idiot coach kids who have a win-at-all-costs mentality 

[Prahakillie]

4 hours ago, skygod said:

In Scottish football’s so-called elite professional league, a quarter of the clubs are permitted to use artificial surfaces. 

 

All of them are permitted to use artificial surfaces. 

[Candygram for mongo]

On 20 November 2018 at 3:50 AM, Bobby14 said:

 

Thought it was a good read and laugh which would've been the intention.  

His basic point is correct albeit he's had to exaggerate for humour. Scotland being left behind; unable to compete with other 'ordinary' European teams; like playing a different sport; dreadful surfaces; dreadful officials and a Micky Mouse governance.