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Of Course Young Dembele Chose To Play For England. Scotland Is A Shambles.

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No-one at any level of the SFA should be complaining, wailing, whining or otherwise bitching over the decision young Karamoko Dembele has made to choose representing England over Scotland.

Why would any player with the choice of one or the other choose Scotland right now?

For any footballer sure of his own talent it’s not even a decision which requires firing up brain cells.

The Scottish international setup is a shambles from top to bottom. We have no leadership worthy of the name. We haven’t qualified for a major competition’s final stages for an eon and nothing looks like improving on that front. We’re a joke.

This is a blow for Celtic as well as Scotland’s national team, of course, because if he does want to play for England the chances are that he won’t be doing from the SPL.

English managers are notoriously biased about that, so it makes the kid harder to hang onto … but for all that I cannot fault his decision and I cannot argue with the logic behind it.

The kid has to think ahead. Even looking ten years into the future doesn’t offer much hope of light at the end of the tunnel for Scotland. It was up to our national coaches to convince this kid that there was something to look forward to as part of their setup and clearly they failed, miserably, to do so.

That’s their fault, not his.

It’s also hard to escape the undertone of bitterness in the way this has been reported, although if he’d chosen to play for Ireland instead the language would have been far harsher.

The word “traitor” might even have been used, and that it hasn’t been and won’t be tells you everything you need to know about some of the hacks and the way they behaved when McGeady and McCarthy famously took that decision.

He doesn’t have to put up with that, at least.

Look, this isn’t good news for anybody but let’s not kid ourselves; it’s the decision any reasonable person would have made, and especially when you look at the absolute chaos at the SFA at the moment.

None of us would chain our futures and our fates to that lot, so why should we expect one of our best upcoming footballers to?

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