Aidan Smith: Gordon Strachan’s elephant-size contempt for lower league clubs

‘Former Scotland manager’s criticisms are astonishing’

Former Scotland manager Gordon Strachan has a reputation for speaking his mind. Picture: SNS

Gordon Strachan is not unfamiliar with elephants. Coventry City were the club where he ended his distinguished playing career and also where he started out as a manager. An elephant, you see, is prominent on the Sky Blues’ crest.

What about the elephant in the room? Is the wee man willing to confront the issue that many will shy away from ever discussing? Oh yes. He’s just gone and called half of Scotland’s teams a waste of space.

Not in as many words, but this is basically what he means. Clubs in the lower two divisions aren’t professional “and yet we give them a vote like they are,” the former Scotland manager asserted. They pretend to be professional “and expect us to look after them”. They don’t produce players who go on to better things and “they’re not even very good community clubs at times”, he claimed.

The outburst came during a BBC Scotland podcast and Strachan didn’t just strafe Leagues One and Two. Turning to the Scottish top-flight matches deemed fit for live TV coverage alongside glamour games from England, Strachan admitted they sometimes made him cringe with embarrassment.

“You sit on a Sunday and it’s Man United vs Tottenham, Derby vs Leeds… and then is that Livingston-Ross County I’m watching? There has to be a rethink on what product we are showing to the rest of the world. I don’t want this grey thing appearing on my telly… ”

Say what you think, Gord. His comments are what many have occasionally thought. People like Premiership chairmen storming out of summit meetings about matters of great import where they’ve “tried to move Scottish football forward” and been stymied by the diddy clubs. But they’ve never gone public with their views.

The sneering from “fans” down the pub in response to the juxtaposition of a star-studded game from a richer league with more prosaic fare from Scotland is something we can all imagine and have probably heard ourselves a few times. We’ve just never heard it from a leading figure in our game before.

Do Livi in particular deserve “this grey thing”? In the season recently brought to a premature end they scared Celtic twice – being one of only two sides to beat the champions – and finished above Hibernian with Hearts left a considerable distance behind.

Previously, Scotland internationalists have emerged from the Almondvale sludge, including Leigh Griffiths, Robert Snodgrass and Graham Dorrans.

It is true that fewer players in the national team in recent years began life in Leagues One or Two but how many of the current England team have made a similar journey? One such in Scotland, though, is Andy Robertson, ex-Queen’s Park. Robertson, pictured, was rejected by Celtic, who Strachan formerly managed. If Queen’s Park hadn’t been there to pick him up, provide the environment for him to start again, how would he have grown into a Champions League winner and the Scotland captain?

Before the current crisis some argued that Scotland had too many professional clubs and that this was a harsh truth which we’d have to confront at some point. Strachan’s remarks, though, simply sound harsh.

His plain-speaking, quirkiness and reluctance to simply parrot the party-line are good qualities for punditry but these criticisms are astonishing when you remember he is a father-figure for Lowland League side Spartans. Community is Spartans’ raison d’etre but who does Strachan mean when he says that some in One and Two are failing in this function? You just have to follow a club like Montrose on Twitter, as I do, to notice how active and involved they are in their town.

Strachan claims the clubs in his line of fire have no intention to better themselves but they are small by nature and are positioned exactly where their status suggests in the football food-chain. The diddies may have votes but the big clubs carved up the funding cake long ago to make sure they enjoyed the largest pieces. Again, comparison with England suggests no difference with south of the border, and no equivalents to Dumbarton or Forfar Athletic dramatically punching above their weight.

How is it “unprofessional” to be honest, well-run and little miracles of resourcefulness as many in the lower divisions are? What is wrong with not having ideas above one’s station? And how is it professional, as some in the upper tiers have done, to spend more than is earned, to be creative with accountancy, to amass vast player squads, to run huge academies as well and yet pack the pack the first team with foreigners – and almost end up bankrupting the club, the supporters’ dreams and a hundred years-plus of history?

There’s history in Leagues One and Two as well including Clyde’s two Scottish Cups within three years of each other and East Fife’s three League Cups in the space of seven years. Yet Stachan thinks Junior football would be the best place for some.

Oh, and one last thing: not all that glisters in England’s so-called best league in the world is worth your Sunday afternoon. Ask many neutral observers to name the most anticlimactic fixture right now and it would be Man U vs Spurs.

Chronic underperformers with their biggest primadonnas absent again? I’ll stick with the grey thing…

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