Co-Efficient Tanks At Wright Gets It Wrong

Scottish football fans ought to be raging with Tommy Wright today.

This is the guy who had a very public falling out with Celtic last month, with an incontinent rant about how we are partly to blame for the national co-efficient.

In point of fact, we’re guilty as charged.

Getting beaten by teams like Maribor is not acceptable.

But I’d say that it’s more than helped by results such as beating Barcelona.

His comments about winning away from home were a joke, but not as big a joke as his failure to decisively beat, at home, a team with ten men.

Our away record is truly dreadful, but our home form over the years has been excellent.

Rather than accept the truth in John Collins’ criticism, he decided to cast around some blame.

Last night, Collins’ assesment was proved right in spades.

Being knocked out of Europe by a team few of us have ever heard of is not unique to Tommy Wright and his team, though, and it’s a little unfair to single them out.

Had it not been for his comments this would have passed off as just another disastrous European reversal.

When Karagandy’s nearly knocked us out of Europe a few seasons back there were few amongst us who knew a thing about them.

Yet this one feels particularly significant.

Sooner or later Scottish clubs have to get their act together on the continent.

Aberdeen’s stumble last night, where they went through on away goals after a less than inspiring performance, was even more worrying, as they looked the part last year and were unlucky with the draws. I hope this isn’t the start of a worrying trend for them.

Our clubs go into Europe now with the wrong attitude. Even Celtic.

Our board, our manager, even our fans, make more of the negatives associated with Scottish football than they do with the positives.

We are set up to fail before a ball is even kicked because we don’t expect to do otherwise.

At Celtic Park the limit of our ambitions is now simply reaching the Groups.

We once aspired to so much more.

The odds are against us, but not impossibly so.

Yet there’s no excuse for a professional football club from Scotland failing to beat the team who finished fourth in the Armenian league, and when you consider that they played much of the second half against only ten men it becomes even more appalling.

Scottish clubs have to change their approach to European games.

They have to be more open-minded about playing attacking football, and they need to believe they can win these matches rather than meekly surrender in them.

The national team used to have the same, shocking attitude.

Gordon Strachan was able to sort that out, and very damned quickly, and we’ve reaped the benefits.

He’s got pretty much the same players his predecessors had, but he’s got more out of them than they’d ever dreamed.

Our club sides are run by pompous fools who are better at sniping at each other than they are at taking courageous decisions, and inspiring people.

The media seems to take results like last night on the chin, playing into this concept of our game as being inferior.

Inferior to Armenian football? Seriously?

Next week, Celtic takes on the Icelandic champions.

We are expected to win that game with something to spare, but after that the road ahead is a little more difficult.

But only comparatively.

We could face sides such as the champions of Belarus, Poland or Slovenia.

The last two are particularly notable as it’s sides from these football countries that beat us last year.

We ought to be confident of beating those teams, as St Johnstone should have been confident last night, as Aberdeen should have been, as our other European sides in years to come should.

As long as we continue to expect defeat, to treat European football as something we should be honoured just to take part in, then these are the results our club sides will continue to endure long into the future.

I want to see Scottish sides do well.

I suspect most of us do.

Tommy Wright’s ridiculous comments, apportioning equal blame to Celtic for the state of the Scottish co-efficient, have to be seen in the context of last night’s scandalous defeat.

If he and others got their own act together then debates like this would be moot.

Dwelling on a handful of past results, talking about how they won away from home (usually against dreck) as if it excuses this kind of display is a sheer nonsense.

It was a deplorable result, the sort that is simply unforgivable.

The blame for all this spreads in so many directions it’s a waste of time and energy trying to lay them at one particular door or another …

But victory starts in the head and that’s the first thing we have to get right.

Calling this result what it is – an unpardonable disgrace – and refusing to tolerate or accept it is as good a place to start as any.