It’s hard to think of a team that would suffer more from Scotland playing the World Cup Finals in Russia than would Celtic.
Seriously.
There are clubs who will send more players to that tournament than we would, but none that I can think of who will have eight games to play before they even reach the Group Stages of the following season’s Champions League.
If Scotland makes it, some of our players will be lucky to get any rest at all before a crucial season gets underway.
For that reason, I ought to be ambivalent at best about the prospect. In fact, I am concerned but still excited. I would be relieved if Scotland didn’t make it and we were spared the dilemma. I would also be absolutely gutted.
I’m a Scot, and a Scotland fan. That’s just what it is. God knows, there are enough reasons not to be. For so many years the team seemed run for the benefit of Rangers. Whenever they wanted to raise the profile of a player he’d get thrown a few caps. Whenever they couldn’t be bothered, their players would pull out of the national team and sometimes didn’t even particularly concern themselves with offering reasonable excuses.
Scotland players with Celtic connections used to get routinely booed when they weren’t just overlooked as a matter of course.
A section of the support was profoundly anti our club, and that was to say nothing for the SFA itself, which continues to be the main focus of attention and ire for the Bampots and the wider Celtic family.
But I love my country. What else is there to say?
I won’t turn my back on Scotland and her national team just because of bad administrators and past history.
It is like all those people who fall out with God because the churches have some bad people in them. I can separate one from the other. Where I find it harder is in separating “the good of Scotland” from “the good of Celtic” without wanting to put the green and white first.
And I do, of course, because as much as I love Scotland my first love, my lifelong enduring one, will always be the team from the east end of Glasgow, so today I’m a little torn. I want Scotland to do well, to reach those finals, to make a run all the way to the latter stages of the competition, to usurp England in the quarters, to put them out, to sample the joys of one-upsmanship on a national scale instead of just pissing myself laughing at the floundering across the city …
I am selfish at times. I want my cake and eat it too.
But the impact on our own club … it might be profound. We might have players almost literally dropping with exhaustion at a crucial point in a huge game. Our run for eight in a row will not face an obstacle quite like it. Other teams will smell blood, and especially in the early part of the season that might just be in the wind.
And then I relax. Brendan will be planning for that far in advance of the event. Four qualifying rounds sounds daunting but the early ones will be made up mostly of cannon fodder sides … we might get lucky and get one from, say, Luxembourg. That will let us play some of the kids, giving the full internationals a longer break. We would still be confident.
Besides, the close-seasons are getting shorter and shorter anyway, it seems to me. No sooner had the Invincibles finished the last campaign but they were back in training; there’s no long summer of rest anymore, if there ever was. It can feel that way to fans at times, but footballers don’t really down tools and pig out for weeks at a time. These guys are athletes and they act like it whether they are playing or not, or in training or not.
So at worst, some of these guys will start pre-season training a little later on. They will get that much-needed rest, but it may mean a slow start to the league campaign. We can probably afford that, if it comes to it. Besides, we have a good sized squad now. There are players in it who can deputise for those whose season’s lasted a little longer.
It’s not that there’s no “need” to worry, it’s just that perhaps there would be less to worry about than some of the more hysterical commentators and doomsayers would claim. I think we could just about cope with it, if it came to the crunch.
Our Scottish born players are proud to represent the national team and I am always proud to see them do it. Any footballer should be, and they should dream of a World Cup Finals like modern players dream of the Champions League. More so.
Apart from being a tremendous privilege, it should also be a tremendous experience, and a chance to play against players you otherwise maybe never would. And this one is in Europe, which means the more ridiculous traveling should be avoided, for the most part, unless the team ends up in Vladivostok of some godforsaken place like that.
Of course, this might all be academic. Scotland has a lot of hoops to jump through to make it; aside from the necessity of a win here, they also need to go through play-off’s which are going to present their own issues, and for us too as one of them will be in the midst of League Cup final preparations.
These things happen, but only to successful clubs.
Complaining seems silly in light of that.
Good luck to all the Bhoys playing international games today.