You don’t know me…

The Scottish Football Association’s decision to give Gordon Strachan the proverbial unanimous vote of confidence came as no surprise to many of us. Their incompetence and ineptitude has been commonplace for decades. This decision epitomises all that’s wrong with our game.

My concern regarding this seal of approval is one of “We’ve been here before.” It therefore begs the question: “Is he doing a good enough job?”

The SFA considered that and returned an overwhelming “Yes he is.”

I’ve always considered him to be a fairly decent manager. One that gets the best from his players. He’s also had a pretty good track record over the years in club management.

He started at Coventry City, where he kept an average sized club in The Premiership, maintaining mid table respectability for four seasons until ultimately some poor decisions in the transfer market led to the club being relegated. He was sacked a few games into the next season when they started their Championship season poorly.

He then moved to Southampton, where he again did a very respectable job of keeping them in the top half of The English Premiership while also reaching The FA Cup Final (losing 1-0 to Arsenal). They qualified for European Competition due to that success as Arsenal had already reached the Champions League through their league position.

Both Southampton and Coventry City suffered massive downturns in fortune after Strachan had left the manager’s position, both teams hurtling down a couple of divisions into League One. Coincidence maybe but who knows.

About a year and a half later he was offered the Celtic job, where he won three league titles in a row. Although he had the ignominy of a hugely embarrassing 5-0 pasting away from home to Artmedia Bratislava in his first match in charge which was a Champions League qualifier, he took Celtic past the group stages and into the last sixteen of the knockout stages in the next two seasons.

In his fourth year he failed to win the league and left at the end of that season, having yet again enhanced his reputation, all the while reducing the Celtic player wage bill and maintaining a successful football team.

Strachan then headed back down south to Middlesbrough where he signed a host of Rangers and Celtic players, a strategy that failed quite miserably as they struggled in the Championship.

He lasted little more than a year, terminating his contract by mutual consent while refusing any financial pay off. All very honourable and in football highly unusual.

He became the Scotland manager at the beginning of 2013, succeeding Craig Levein and his now infamous 4-6-0 formation that Scottish football fans have neither forgiven him for, nor have they stopped ridiculing Levein for his arrogance that night.

Good manager though he is, Strachan has flaws which undermine his credentials. No one likes a smart arse, something Gordon Strachan might do well to remind himself of as he is considered to be exactly that by many.

He’s a nippy wee sweetie is Gordon. A five and a half foot ginger Scot. One of those guys we all know or have done. He comes across as a know it all at times. You could call it little man syndrome.

That’s all well and good when results are going your way but when you’re losing more than you win? Then, as I said, you come across as a wee nyaff.

In his first year or so he did very well with the national team, adding a host of what appeared to be very good players that enhanced his squad. He tried and tested a few players and used the tail end of Levein’s failed World Cup campaign to get his system and squad together.

The first half of our Euro qualifiers went pretty much according to plan. A tight defeat in Germany apart, his team did really well. A great win against Ireland at home and excellent draws away to Poland and Ireland along with wins against Georgia and Gibralter put us in a terrific position to reach our first major finals in eighteen years.

Then last season things started to change. You could notice he was becomimg narky, with the odd sneering comment at the press corps. That condescending stuff he comes out with at times that none of us likes.

“If you’ve not played the game at the highest level you dont understand what it takes,” or “This isnae the phone-in” started to become common Strachanisms at press conferences. That know it all attitude that rubs most of us up the wrong way.

You’re entitled to that demeanour when you’re getting results but an horrific performance in Georgia that culminated in a 2-0 defeat put Scotland and Strachan under more pressure than need be.

Another defeat to Germany at Hampden, then calamitous defending in a home draw with Poland saw our hopes perish. Again.

Strachan was given an extension to his contract after the away win in Gibraltar, which I personally thought was done in haste but when you take all things into consideration it was as tough a qualifying section as we could have faced so I could see the SFA’s reasoning in offering him another chance.

The start to this campaign has been dreadful. Unacceptable, actually.
A win in Malta, pitiful against Lithuania and two hidings. Firstly, from a bang average Slovakia then a second 3-0 defeat in a row at Wembley, against one of the weakest England sides I’ve ever seen.

Four games in, four points and second bottom of the section. Virtually no chance of going to Russia. Yet on Thursday our governing body told us that Gordon Strachan was doing a great job and was staying. Unanimously. Eight members of the panel. Eight voted. Eight votes of confidence.

I find that virtually impossible to comprehend.

Whether Strachan stays or goes isn’t the issue, his employers are. This lot, led by Stewart Regan, have bungled their way around the last five years. Their predecessors for the twenty years previous to that.

The SFA have settled for utter mediocrity. They’ve sat there and pontificated to the footballing public, all the while lowering expectations. Talking down to the average punter, all the while shafting the general public for every penny they can get.

Bleeding the punters dry, be that Scotland fans going to matches, some of the most horrific kits football has ever witnessed, a Scottish Cup that has no razzmatazz or sparkle, no track record of success (on any level), forcing boys clubs and their parents to pay a fortune to allow kids to play football at all, the farcical way they dealt with the Rangers meltdown, the list is depressingly endless…

Can anyone genuinely think of anything they deserve any credit for?

Think about it….

Nearly three decades of complete ineptitude.

They’ve sat there and allowed Gordon Strachan to throw his players under a bus. His wing man tried to do the same on Friday. Don’t let that man near a microphone again! I’ve seen more intelligence on the magical new David Attenborough show – Planet Earth II on a Sunday night.

This lowering of expectations has been allowed to fester for too long. Administrators bemoaning our lot continually. Managers going out of their way to perpetually insist that our players are technically deficient.

Whose fault’s that then…? Scotland – along with the rest of the UK – is the most expensive country in the continent to achieve your UEFA coaching licence.

I don’t see very many quality coaches coming out of Largs and I see even less good players coming out of this country these days.

Generations have passed without a world class or even a top grade player coming out of this system the SFA have produced.

We have English Premiership players, Champions League, English Championship and Scottish Premiership players. None of them have the SFA to thank for their careers.

Football clubs are businesses; they seek to get the best players available to them within the structure of their club. That is normal, self-interest is natural in that respect.

The SFA is responsible for football in this country from grass roots up.

It’s responsible for the standard of players, coaches, facilities and the structure of the game.

The SFA has failed us for forty years in these aspects of the game.

Kids are getting the talent choked out of them, and it is well-known that creativity seems to be frowned upon at youth level. Well it’s the coaches that get their badges from Largs who are teaching our children how to play football.

I’m not suggesting the clubs are blameless but they have a natural self-interest. They’ll get the best coaches and players available to them. Teams try to finish as high up the league as they can.

The SFA have failed the game from grass roots all the way up the ladder.

Last Thursday’s decision to unanimously vote for Gordon Strachan to stay in the hot seat was the latest epic fail.

The very fact that this decision was unanimous tells us all we need to know. Strachan is bigger than the SFA panel that took the decision.

He wanted to stay so he did stay. The SFA don’t have to look for a new manager and we move on to a home game against Slovenia in March.

Lose that and it won’t be Strachan who looks like an idiot. He’ll tell us his main concern is for the players in that changing room.

Players he tells us aren’t good enough but look at the facts here. Players that play in top leagues that make the most basic mistakes at international level.

Guys that earn tens of thousand of pounds a week which puts them in plausibly the top 20% of the biggest earners in world football.

It comes down to professionalism and an ability to make the right decisions. I watch some damned good Scottish players play for their clubs. They don’t bring that form to the national team.

It shouldn’t surprise us, it’s been going on forever. Our governing body is supposed to lead the game but even back in the sixties, seventies and eighties we had an Anglo problem where the players coming up from their English clubs bemoaned the amateurish set up.

Seems to me and just about everybody else that lack of professionalism comes from the very top of our game and flows all the way through the veins of the game up here.

There’s only one organisation that shoulders the blame for the mess our game is in. They’ve lorded over our game. A game that thrived and they desecrated it. The SFA isn’t fit for purpose.

So when Gordon Strachan patronises journalists with his “If you think I’m concerned about myself, you don’t know me” comments we shouldn’t be surprised.

The journalist isn’t interested in you Gordon, he’s interested in the fact you seem incapable of getting a result these days. That’s a story that newspapers can sell, you see.

We don’t want to know you, Gordon. We want to know if you can fix the national team. It looks to most of us that you can’t but you’ve decided to stay. The golf course can wait

Your decision, not the panel of eight with not a pair of balls between them.

They’re useless. The game is crying out for leadership and someone that can take our game back to a decent level.

When you see countries such as Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Iceland, and Albania all achieving more than our country can then you know there’s a problem.

For me the clubs should get together and find a way of finding a way out of this mess. The SFA have had their time.

Our national game is an embarrassment to us all. Decades of failure and no end in sight. What a shambles it’s become. Our national team manager only highlights how insular and barricaded this lot are. It’s time for change and the sooner it happens the better.