The Walter Smith for Scotland bandwagon is in full tilt now.
Many of the hacks are battering the keyboards, the papers are filling up with how great he is, his CV is being dusted off and it seems like only a matter of time before the SFA invites him for formal talks. At that point, if he decides to attend, I don’t know see any way he won’t get the gig.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, just when you think our national sport could not be more backward or insular or amateurish, an association without a CEO is contemplating, after years of reforms and talk about looking ahead, stepping back ten years to appoint a guy who actually had the job and walked out of it without a backward glance.
The hacks promoting this are ignoring that. In their eyes our opposition can only be about one thing; he is an ex-Rangers manager. Forget that this appointment would make Scottish football a laughing stock, retreating a decade to offer the job to a 70-year-old who hasn’t been involved with the game for seven years … as with what happened in 2012, our concern can’t possibly be for the sport itself and its reputation. No, our motives are sinister.
I don’t care what the media thinks of my opinion on this; I’m a Celtic blogger and I’m already on the record as saying my opposition to this is, in part, because it confirms the SFA as a retirement home for the Real Rangers Men.
They can take that however they want, but the old boys network has already scorched the sport and its standing and this would be just another example of it.
The guys being mentioned for this gig are all ex Rangers men.
My opposition to that is grounded not only in the lack of imagination it shows, but in an unshakeable suspicion that what some in the media really wants is for the Scotland job to be a temporary staging post prior to a return to Ibrox. Murty may not survive until the end of the season, but how nice it would be for Sevco if they could offer him a one year deal knowing Smith or McLeish were back in the game again.
That these two are being pushed for the job – a job both have held – is ridiculous. Is this what we’ve come to, for God’s sake? Did we exhaust every other possibility? Why is it that some people in the press simply cannot see past the same old faces? These guys were both linked with a return to Ibrox when Pedro was sacked; why are they so without vision?
Where does it say the next boss has to be Scottish anyway?
The hacks who are demanding some of us name better bosses have to be joking; there are thousands of managers out there, who have no connection to Scotland, who could come in and do as good a job, if not better, than those two.
But none of them are in consideration.
Why do you get the impression that the SFA has simply given up looking and decided to settle for what they could get, cheap, in the here and now? That embarrasses our game, and that some of the hacks are selling it, or trying to, should embarrass them. They are beyond shaming though.
This isn’t to say that every journalist is on board; as usual it takes someone from outside the West of Scotland, a self-confessed Hearts fan, to bring sanity to the proceedings.
Ewan Murray, of The Guardian, has thoroughly hammered this idea as a massive backward step, and has pointed to the “revisionism” about Smith’s previous tenure – and especially compared to that of Craig Levein.
Levein is not my favourite guy, as everyone’s aware. But his ten wins in twenty-four games as international boss stands up next to Smith’s, who won seven in sixteen. Neither record sets the heather on fire, but whilst Levein’s tenure is labelled a disaster no such vituperate adhesive is applied to that of Smith.
Murray is 100% right. This is the West of Scotland media at its finest.
But what’s worse here is the contempt they show for the ordinary football fan in this country, most of whom have no connection to Celtic Park and Ibrox and only the most peripheral interest in the clubs who play there.
It is scandalous that they are being lumped together under the “everyone hates Rangers” banner, turning a debate into the very future of our game into something on the level of a schoolyard scrap. It is disgusting that the media would chose to paint all opposition to this shocking idea as being motivated by “anti Rangers hate.”
As if the idea itself doesn’t make this country look backward.
The media could not be making it more clear that they disdain the views of the fans.
They are pissing all over us, frankly. But it also betrays their utter lack of concern for the future and reputation of the game itself. All they care about is promoting the case for one of their pals. If they have to make Scotland’s football supporters look like tribalists of the worst kind, then so be it.
The fans, by the way, have had their say on this; there are three separate opinion polls up on Twitter right now. One has been completed, two are ongoing. One of those is The Evening Times poll, which has only had a modest number of votes; they are 63% against Smith. The other poll still running is from the Scottish Football Supporters Association; it has just shy of 1000 votes, and runs until this evening. It has a staggering 93% opposed to Smith’s appointment.
But blowing both away is the poll put out yesterday by the Twitter handle Agent Scotland; it attracted a stunning 12,000 votes … and to say they were mostly opposed is an understatement. 84% of its respondents were dead set against the idea.
The hacks will try to spin this their own way, but the overwhelming fact is that Scotland fans do not want this guy. The Daily Record, publishing one of the worst articles I’ve ever read even in that disreputable rag, says that appointing Smith would be the SFA’s “first step towards redemption.” Try damnation. I cannot think of a decision they could make that would make me view them with more disgust than I do already.
But it’s nothing compared to the disregard with which it would treat the ordinary fans, who only want a team to be proud of and an association they can believe in.
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