David Pleat yesterday leaped into the parade of ignorant England based “commentators” who think they have all the answers as to what is “wrong” with Celtic and how they can fix us and Scottish football at the same time.
Pleat is sort of unique in this (s)hit parade. Whilst the others are mostly desperate hacks, without a real clue of what it’s like to run a club, he, at least, has a managerial CV. He had spells at Luton, Tottenham, Leicester, Sheffield Wednesday and Notts Forest. He never won a major honour and was sacked from all those clubs. His term at Spurs was notable for the fact it wasn’t just bad form that got him binned but three cautions for kerb crawling.
He is now a clapped out hack, on Radio 5 live.
Earlier this week, in the wake of Scotland’s dismal match against Canada, he was pontificating on how we are to blame for the shocking state of the national team.
Apparently, Scottish kids aren’t getting a chance. It seems we have too many foreign players up here.
Read that again if you please; there are too many foreign players in the SPL.
Celtic, in particular, have an over-reliance on them.
“There must still be kids out there desperate to emulate great Scottish players,” he said, “and they can’t be getting encouragement. They certainly can’t be getting the coaching. You want players, young players with natural talent to be progressed quickly and I don’t see this with the senior teams. The big teams like Celtic have got foreign players in there, in Scotland. They don’t need foreign players ….”
Aaah where even to start?
Let’s try this. There are six Celtic players in the national squad, or who regularly play for Scotland; Craig Gordon. Kiernan Tierney, Scott Brown, Stuart Armstrong, James Forrest and Leigh Griffiths. All of them, bar Leigh, are first team, first picks, nearly every week, and all of them are guaranteed to be in the squad week in week out when they are fit.
Of those players, Tierney and Forrest were produced in our own youth academy. Add to them Callum McGregor and Liam Henderson. Other home grown players will feature before this season ends. Former youth academy players from Celtic are to be found at clubs all over the country. If other clubs are sleeping at the wheel that’s not our fault; the Celtic Park youth academy is a football conveyer belt that produces professional players with unbelievable regularity, and some of them have gone on to very fine careers.
Tierney is one of the most wanted players on this island at the moment.
There are eight Scottish players in our main squad, for every game, and nine if you include Gary Mackay Steven.
One of our brightest young talents, Ryan Christie, is another Scot, and he’s out on loan at the moment.
Whatever else we can be accused of, filling the team with foreign players is something that just doesn’t stand up at all. I wrote earlier in the week about young John McGinn; that article was received very positively in most quarters. Our fans enjoy seeing us develop native talent; Pleat’s comments are ignorant and insulting. I mean, did this guy do even the most basic piece of research before he came away with this garbage?
If he’s including English players, or those on loan from English clubs, amongst the “foreigners” we have up here in Scotland, then we probably should look at that, but not from the perspective he’s talking about.
Take Patrick Roberts, who can’t get in to our team on a regular basis because of, yes, product of our own youth academy; if Pleat is so concerned about young players being pushed aside for foreign garbage perhaps he should talk to Man City who bought this guy from Fulham and then couldn’t’ shuffle him out the door fast enough, lest his career died in their reserves.
How many cracking young English talents are stagnating on substitutes benches or in reserve teams right now? How many young English kids will never get a chance because their clubs are touring the amateur and youth teams of the world bringing in foreign talent?
Pleat ought to point this bone-headed ignorance of his in the direction of home. His favourite club, Spurs, has fifteen players in the squad right now who hail from outside of this island. There are a further three foreign players out on loan. And with Trippier, Dier, Kane, Walker, Rose, Winks and Delle Ali in the first team squad they are actually one of the best EPL clubs at actually nurturing young home-grown players.
Seventeen Manchester United players came from outside of England or Wales. There are twenty one at Manchester City – not including guys out on loan, of whom there are over a dozen. There are sixteen at Liverpool. There are twenty at Arsenal … you get the drift.
The only reason these sides have any domestic players at all – and the only reason most of them have bothered with academy systems, to my mind – is that European competition requires you to have eight players “home grown” in the country and four who came through the youth ranks at the club itself.
Otherwise those numbers would be far worse.
Everyone knows our national team isn’t cutting it. That might have something to do with the manager himself choosing to cap second rate junk from the English second tier rather than looking at the far better native prospects we have up here; a Scotland midfield three of Armstrong, Brown and Kenny McLean, or young McGinn, with Forrest on one wing and Hayes or Christie on the other, with Griffiths backed up by Jamie Walker … that would be a decent proposition.
Instead we have a side that can somehow accommodate Chris Martin.
But I’ve got news for Pleat; our national team’s underachieving has got nothing on that of his own nation, and with a population ten times greater than ours and the resources to match, and nor does the relative success or failure of our club sides. For all the money English clubs spend, the EPL’s co-efficient is third in Europe behind that of Germany and Spain. France and Italy are catching them up, and all four countries have vastly superior national squads.
So too does Belgium, who’s international stars are the fulcrum of many a top flight English club. In the current squad right now, the goalkeepers Courtois and Mignolet are first team picks at Chelsea and Liverpool; two of Belgium’s top central defenders are at Spurs, as is one of their best midfielders (Moussa Dembele, not to be confused with our own!), one plays for West Brom, one each play for City and United respectively and of their seven international strikers six are first picks for clubs in the EPL, including Michy Batshuayi, Romelu Lukaku and Christian Benteke and this squad does not include Jason Denayer, Vincent Kompany, Stefan Defour or Eden Hazard.
But it does include Dedryck Boyata!
England’s population is, as I’ve said, ten times what ours is. We have a very small pool of players to choose from here, and I think it’s a credit to our club that we’ve managed to do so well and have as many Scot’s in the team – and club produced ones at that – as we do. I don’t know what excuse Pleat can offer up for the failure of so many English sides to do the same.
I am not asking these people to change their views on our club or on Scottish football as a whole, but when they rattle off easily shot-down nonsense like that it makes it awfully hard to listen to anything constructive they might have to say.
We must look like an easy option at the moment, a good target for their sniping.
Shame they can’t point that perception where it belongs, at the so-called Best League In The World and the colossal failure to deliver on all fronts that haunts English football right now. Like Sevconuts, they would rather look to gloat over perceived failures elsewhere than to look with honesty, and a critical eye, at those which are closer to home.
We’ve all seen what good that did the mob across the city.