The media is making much of Chris Martin being booed last night when he came on for the national side. Watching it at home, I was pretty cheesed off to see him arrive on the pitch. Fletcher and Rhodes are better players, to my mind, but Gordon Strachan doesn’t seem to like either. We’ve always known he had a certain blind-spot when it comes to certain players; anyone who followed his tenure at Celtic is well aware of it.
Had I been there at the game, I’d have swallowed that emotion. A player coming on for his national team deserves respect, much as a player coming on for Celtic does. Booing your own player? That’s got to be a modern phenomenon right? A symbol of this sometimes selfish age?
Well, no, actually. It’s an old one.
There was a time when an entire generation of Celtic fans wouldn’t go to watch Scotland because the booing of our players was a matter of routine.
How the times have changed.
Last night there were six Celtic first team players in that starting line-up, and Charlie Mulgrew was playing for us this time last year.
Scotland is managed by a former Celtic boss and his assistant is an ex Celtic player. Last night a lot of fun was being had over those facts, although I suspect some people were gearing up to blame us if Scotland had lost that game.
It was great to see it last night, and it was great to see the Scotland game getting talked about on a lot of Celtic pages, where there was a good deal of pride in our players, especially Stuart, Kieran and Leigh. All of them played well, including Forrest, in spite of what a lot of click-bait headlines read this morning. Having so many players from one side in the team helps get good performances, but it wouldn’t work if they weren’t on their game. Last night they were.
The Tartan Army is a changed thing. I’ve co-edited their magazine for the last couple of years (some issues with that are, hopefully, on the way to being resolved) and I love those guys. It wasn’t always so. Friends of mine have long memories, of going to see Scotland in the 80’s and hearing Celtic players getting booed.
One mate of mine told me that his sole visit to Hampden to watch the national team – against Northern Ireland – would have ended in arrest over the reactions of Scotland fans to Celtic players being tackled, had a big bruiser from the Highlands not beaten him to it and doled out some punishment to the people responsible.
What I find most amazing is that the media barely stirred during all this. There was no major outcry over it. In point of fact, there was a time when it was a minor miracle to see Celtic players actually in the national team. So many of our greats were snubbed. So many won an absurdly small number of caps. The Lisbon Lions are the greatest collection of Scottish players ever; so many of them didn’t get their due from the SFA and we all know part of that was bias.
Even today, there are annoying little niggles that frustrate Celtic supporters. Lee Wallace’s inclusion in the Scotland squad is a clear sop to the “Old Firm media” and a cohort inside Hampden that can’t imagine not having at least one Ibrox player in the team. But last night showed how woefully inadequate he is compared to the brilliant Robertson and the magnificent Tierney. There should be no question of his inclusion ahead of those guys again.
Likewise, the last Scotland player I remember being booed was Ian Black.
It was poor form from the fans to do that for his one and only appearance in the team, but it was scandalous that he ever got called up in the first place.
A player of his low quality, and plying his trade in the fourth tier … that was a joke and the Tartan Army weren’t responding to him as much as to the managerial decision to include him. The media had lauded his inclusion; in my opinion their pandering threw him to the wolves.
I didn’t like to see the fans doing it, but I understood exactly why they did.
The Tartan Army’s historical reticence towards Celtic players was even easier to grasp.
There were a lot of bigots in its ranks.
The transformation has been incredible. It’s now large numbers of Ibrox fans who won’t go to watch Scotland … and increasing numbers of our fans embrace them. Part of that is the independence campaign; it gave a lot of Scottish Celtic fans a new-found pride in their country and made them look again at a lot of aspects of what it means to be a Scot. Sevco fans went the other way, many of them embracing Unionism ever tighter … a lot even started following England.
The nature of the national team support is ever-evolving. I actually think that those Sevco fans who don’t follow the national team would find the atmosphere at Hampden more conducive than they imagine. It’s a long time since Scotland fans booed the national anthem of Liechtenstein, for example, and you hear none of the dirge from the stands that seems to be such a part of following England at the moment, the Little Brexiter nonsense that’s such a part of the Wembley experience at the present time. The Tartan Army reputation for being all embracing is hard-fought and won; these guys will never let it be tarnished.
Does booing one player do that? Was it Martin being booed, or the decision not to bring on Rhodes or Fletcher? In the end, a handful of fans weren’t happy with a selection decision and let the manager know it. It beats the days when they booed players of a certain club, just because. I felt bad for Martin, although I wouldn’t have brought him on myself. But he reacted in the only way a player who’s been through that experience should; he scored.
Next time, I suspect the reaction he gets will be a little different.