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Scotland
It is my conviction that to understand history is to understand. It is my contention too that Scottish, indeed, Scots football is no exception. Which leads us on to two unavoidable questions.
The first is what has happened to bring Scottish football, that is the game in Scotland itself, to the sorry, technically- and tactically impoverished and win-less state, in which it finds itself until so very recently , this whilst, I would maintain and results confirm, it was for the fifty years or so from 1875 the best in the World and, after a brief interregnum, Scots-style football, as results equally but sadly elsewhere also confirm, has over the seven decades from the mid-1950s come to dominate the best that is played in the World?
My argument is thus. Although football was born in England, before it reached it teens, its real formative years, it moved home, north across the border and there is stayed until the end of the 1920s, during which period it was the source of almost every innovation in the tactics of and the style, in which the game was played. And equally since the 1950s it has been, although undoubtedly not the direct source, beyond our borders and world-wide at the root of most of the same. In fact, rather than trying to spot-light its influences, it is far easier to point to the moments when it has not been pivotal; Italian football in the 1930s, the Swedes of 1958, Alf Ramsey's genius in winning the the 1966 World Cup, the 1986 Argentinians and to an extent the German approach to the game. Which leaves the period in between, when whilst outwith these islands the Scots game having been adopted was adapted, at home the plot was beginning to be lost almost simultaneously at club and national level, starting perhaps on the day in 1933 that the then Scottish Football Association President, Robert Campbell, stepped down. From that moment the style, The Cross, that Scotland had developed so successfully over the previous three decades and had lead to multiple victories was suddenly questioned, thought to be not worthy and in its home country largely abandoned, the grandstand left to rot.
There were no doubt reasons, not least financial. It was the 1930s, the Depression. Economically time were hard and perhaps clubs in Scotland, needing to balance the books by player sales, tried too hard to please the market, English English league, by supplying what was thought it wanted and not what it needed. The identi-player rather than the different, the flair-player, was what was produce, just as with regard to European clubs is increasingly the case in South America today for precisely the same reasons. And there were, of course exceptions. At club level at Rangers, the most successful team of the era, it was still the way until Bill Struth's retirement in the mid-fifties. Individually too even amongst those, who taken the road to England there were also still some, notably Matt Busby and Bill Shankly but others too, who had been raised Old-Style, had it still within and would in management allow it a last flourish. Even at international level in spite of the serial failures of the SFA there was brief hope. For five years in the early 1960s Ian McColl, as Scotland's manager, carrying the Leven Vale torch of Ferguson, Kelly and Jackson in one hand and that of Struth's Rangers in the other, blended thought with ability, flair and organisation, until fate first wore him down and drove him in short time out of the game entirely.
Nevertheless, by the 1970s and certainly since the turn of the 21st Century Scottish football was and has been a spent force, in spite of still having what remains, if not the amongst the top rank of Europe's football leagues, then one of the very best of the rest. Which leads on to the second question. What can be done to bring Scottish football, if not back to its former glory, although that would be welcome, then to a standard at the very least commensurate with its standing? The first step is real recognition. For lack of care the Scottish footballing grandstand, the grand stand that that was has largely rusted to little more than a memory. It is not even Hampden but slowly submerging Cathkin Park. True there has been some ability but also a paucity of the flair, a lack of the unpredictability that had once been a hallmark.
There has also been organisation but little deep thought. Scotland is not a country, where one size fits all, for example, yet when it comes to developing footballing talent that simple fact remains unrecognised. But now is time for change. Railing against reality will solve nothing but asking why the best "wide full-backs", the best "pocket centre-forward", the World's best "attacking centre-halves", today's "R.C. Hamilton", all originally Scottish innovations, are Spanish, Sergio Aguero, Belgian or is it Croatian and a German might? Finding the answers would be even better. Replicating them could be better still. Is it not said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Doesn't football history tells us that once we were the flattered and for good reason. And might its message just now be that the time has come for us to reciprocate; to watch, to listen, to learn, to implement and to improve?