So this was in the Times football section today:
And you find yourself thinking, “Well gee, why might THAT be?”
Everyone’s entitled to take their own position on constitutional politics. But there’s something really dismaying about people who represent Scotland in international sport coming out and declaring that they don’t think Scotland is a nation.
Rugby players don’t compete in the Six Regions Trophy and Bavaria doesn’t get a team in the World Cup. There’s a perfectly fair and reasoned argument that says “If you don’t think Scotland is a nation, then don’t accept international caps, don’t wear the national badge and don’t stand there singing the national anthem”.
As an Aberdeen fan I was especially gutted when McLeish, Willie Miller, Jim Leighton and Alex Ferguson came out for “Better Together”, but nothing could ever destroy the magical memories of what they achieved for my club in the 1980s. When the national team is involved, though, it becomes something harder to stomach bordering on flat-out dishonest.
Countless articles, books and TV shows have speculated that Scotland’s catastrophic showing in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina had a direct impact on the following year’s devolution referendum, with a shattered nation bereft of the self-belief to vote in sufficient numbers to establish a Scottish Assembly.
It hardly seems an enormous stretch to imagine that it also cuts the other way – that a country too afraid to take political responsibility for itself when it came to the crunch would feel a debilitating pang of shame and embarrassment when it came to standing out there on the pitch before kick-off singing about rising now and being a nation again.
McLeish, of course, abandoned Scotland the first time he was the national coach when Birmingham City waved some money at him, walking away from his contract despite having only narrowly failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup from a group that had BOTH of the previous tournament’s finalists in it.
(He took Birmingham up to the Premiership in his first season with the club, only to get them relegated again the next year and walk away from them too.)
Despite being statistically the best manager in Scotland’s history, McLeish hadn’t either the belief to knuckle down and go one step further next time or the patriotism to put his country/region before his wallet, and he left the team to George Burley, whereupon its win rate plummetted from 70% to just 21%.
So all we’re saying is that if he’s looking for someone to blame for Scotland lacking confidence in itself, both on the football pitch and in a wider sense, it might be time to stop casting around for other suspects and have a wee keek in the nearest mirror.
