Berti's woeful Scotland team is lesson to us all

Published on Friday 20 August 2004 02:50

ALAS, poor Scotland. The sports pages have been enriched over the past fortnight by eulogies of the late Gordon Smith, a footballer who shines bright in the memory of almost everybody who saw him play, even though it is more than 40 years since he retired.

I daresay many who have written about him did so in a then-and-now spirit: look back on that picture and the glory days of Scottish football and compare it with the present drab scene.

Then again just the other day we had Denis Law and Willie Henderson promoting a vote for new candidates for the Scottish Football Association’s Hall of Fame, and that brought other memories of great players surging back - Law for instance mentioning John White, a star of the Tottenham Hotspur double-winning side of the early Sixties, who died very young as a result of being struck by lightning on the golf course. Law then said no, he wouldn’t be watching the friendly between Scotland and Hungary at Hampden Park because it was too depressing. How right he was.

That Scottish football is in a bad way has long been widely acknowledged. Only Berti Vogts and a few diehard fans, with or without laptops, can pretend otherwise. It seems we haven’t won a friendly at Hampden since 1996, which must be some kind of record. More importantly we failed to qualify for this summer’s European championships, and for the last World Cup.

No-one can view the qualifying matches for the next World Cup with anything short of foreboding. We are now the worst international team in the British Isles.

It seemed only too appropriate that Hungary’s third goal came when a Scottish defender kicked the ball into his own goalkeeper and it bounced into the net. Not that Hungary themselves were much good. Hungarian football, like ours, has fallen from high estate. They are not the "Magyar magicians" of 50 years ago: no Puskases or Hidegkutis on tap. One commentator described them as "a team of modest ability but clear purpose". That’s something, I suppose. There has been little evidence of clear purpose in Berti Vogt’s selection or in the way his teams play.

Naturally there are now calls, once again, for his head. If he was a club manager he wouldn’t have lasted this long. The fans would be howling, directors ringing their bank managers to see if they could afford to dismiss him.

The Spanish, French, German, and Italian managers, whose teams all failed in Portugal this summer, have gone; but Berti, whose team didn’t get there, remains.

It’s difficult now to recall the euphoria expressed when he was appointed. (But then it’s equally hard to remember the euphoria that greeted the Scottish Parliament.) Perhaps he should go, if only because a new man might, simply on account of his novelty, give the team an impetus it lacks today.

Probably he’ll stay, stubbornly determined to prove that he can still achieve something. But the truth, the sad truth, is that it really doesn’t matter whether he stays or goes. Any replacement will be faced with the same grim reality.

Law, again, was quite clear about this. The two biggest and richest clubs in Scotland, Rangers and Celtic, seek success in Europe with teams almost entirely composed of foreigners. They buy players who are (supposedly) ready-made.

In contrast, the Celtic team that won the European Cup in 1967 had nobody in it born more than 40 miles from Celtic Park. This, Law pointed out, is not all. In his day all the best teams in England regularly fielded two, three, four, even five Scots. They don’t now. The best three clubs in England are Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea; young Darren Fletcher is the only Scot playing for any of them.

All sorts of reasons have been advanced for the drying-up of Scottish footballing talent, though blaming it on the teachers’ strikes of the 1980s is now a rather threadbare excuse. Boys, we are told, no longer play games of football and keepy-uppy in city closes, which themselves no longer exist, so the peculiar ball skills of the tanner ba’ geniuses are lost for ever. Over- coaching is blamed by some, poor coaching by others. Children sit in front of television sets instead of being out playing. Education authorities frown on competition because losing is bad for the kids’ tender morale. And so on. There is something in this, but the trouble is that it all applies to other parts to the UK, which do nevertheless still manage to produce a few footballers of real ability. So what’s the answer? I’m afraid it’s simple and has very little to do with football. Or, rather, what has happened in football is evidence of what ails Scotland.

We talk of excellence - our politicians do so with nauseating frequency, but we accept, and practise, and are content with, mediocrity. The nation of Hume, Burns, Scott, Roseburn, Carlyle and Stevenson now has Frank McAveety as its minister for culture.

The nation that once set the world standards in education now ensures that nobody, or almost nobody, is permitted to fail an exam. The country where universities once trained more doctors than England, or indeed than any other country in Europe, now has not only the worst health record but one of the worst health services in the West. A nation that was once the home of the Protestant work ethic now has one in ten people of working age receiving "incapacity benefit".

"Clyde-built" used to be a synonym for excellence, but the great ships are no longer built there. And if commercial orders were still placed on the Clyde (if there were firms to receive them), do you think the ships would be delivered on time? Like the Scottish Parliament? Four years late and ten times over budget, it is the perfect symbol of our acceptance of mediocrity.

Do you blame the managements of Rangers and Celtic, and indeed those of other Scottish Premier League clubs, for turning to foreigners? You shouldn’t. They are merely lagging behind our political masters who for years told us that the only means of regenerating the Scottish economy was by attracting inward investment. We couldn’t come up with the goods (even though the Scottish financial sector is one of the biggest money-lenders in Europe), so foreigners must save the day. Alas, they didn’t - any more than they have brought Rangers and Celtic European success.

Mediocrity, comfortable mediocrity - that’s what suits us. We may talk about wanting success, but the effort is too great.

Of course there are individual successes. Of course there are patches of excellence. But they embarrass us: look at the fate of Scottish Opera. The old footballing cry "ca’ the legs frae ’im" is heard. We prefer mediocrity.

Our parliament, stuffed with mediocrities, suits us fine. We can enjoy the pleasure of mocking it and girning at it - those pleasures being the deepest because they are effortless.

Sometimes, in black moments, I think we have become like the Sicilians as described by the prince in Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard. He said: "The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery."

Indeed, yes: wha’s like us? Berti must stay. His football team is the mirror in which we see ourselves, our modern Scotland, our new but very old Scotland, perfectly reflected.