International football. don’t you just love it ?
Two tournaments lasting two years each, as it appears that the longer you drag these things out, and the more districts or parishes you can find with a fairly reasonable claim to be a nation state, somehow we are all going to find it more interesting.
In the old days, there’d be three or at worst four countries in your qualifying group, these days there’s six or seven. Which makes it all rather tedious.
Scotland have two games during this break. One at home to Lithuania, the other away to Slovakia. Not exactly box office material, so the media, who these days have been relegated to a sort of Public Relations exercise, with occasional advertisements, have tried to jazz things up a bit.
Which, I guess, can’t be a bad thing as it means they haven’t allocated one cameraman per Celtic player in a bid to find a story to fill their pages.
For example, in a bid to drum up interest in a team which has layers such as Steven Fletcher and Alan Hutton in it, one headline ( Record ) may have overdone it a bit..
It’s do or die for Gordon Strachan in crunch
Scotland World Cup qualifier.
And here’s me thinking he’d just get his jotters if it all goes pear shaped. The SFA need to be careful. If the death penalty is invoked for failure they might find it a little tricky to find a replacement for Strachan after he’s been tied to a pole and shot.
No, not that one.
The article mentions the possibility of more severe recriminations should Scotland lose, which, given Strachans links with Celtic and generally low opinion of those in the SMSM, perhaps gives us a glimpse into the world of the writer than he probably would have liked us to see. It’s Keith Jackson, by the way. Though you’d probably guessed.
Strachan has never bothered much about his own popularity, which is probably just as well. But he is intelligent enough to keep his finger on the pulse of public opinion, so he will be perfectly well aware by now that a lynch mob is forming and preparing to mobilise at the first opportunity.
Perhaps they’ll drag him around George Square behind a horse to get everyone in the mood for a good ole fashioned neck stretch ?
Or maybe its better that he just falls from a great height, which again has subtle undertones of acknowledging Strachans disdain of the chip wrapper writers…
Effectively, as a consequence of one failed campaign, Strachan is now walking on a tightwire without a safety net. And he knows it.
Tightwire is another word for tightrope, by the way, and not some weird kind of fetish leg covering for ladies.
Suddenly, Jackson realises he may have gone too far, and if Strachan does end up sleeping with the fishes, then he might be on a conspiracy charge…
It’s all nonsense, of course. The truth of the matter is we are lucky to have a man of Strachan’s calibre at the helm and few appreciate this more than his players
Well, the journalists don’t.
Then he reloads and fires again, at a different target. ( all this military talk makes todays diary look like an Ibrox statement ), this time at Scott Brown, who quit international football to lengthen his club career;
Brown’s retirement is a great shame because Strachan could do with having him around at this moment. It’s no coincidence Brendan Rodgers has spent so much time lately raving about the qualities of his talismanic skipper who scored Celtic’s winner at Dens Park on Saturday after starring against Manchester City last Wednesday.
Like Strachan, the 31-year-old often splits public opinion but even those critics who have very little understanding of the game could not have failed to spot his influence all over that thunderous Champions League affair. In the most polished of company, Brown stood out like a sore thumb.
As a result, Rodgers now openly admits he’s a better player than even he had first thought so there is no question Strachan and Scotland will be worse off without him.
Too far again ?
Aye.
But Brown’s absence will not necessarily torpedo Strachan’s chances of getting through this group. In Darren Fletcher, James McArthur, James Morrison, Barry Bannan and John McGinn, the manager is adequately covered for options in the middle.
The reason for the attention paid to international football, and this article ?
Well, I can’t be the only one who thinks that instead of supporting Scotland in this do or die game-and we will all be doing that, unless we aren’t Scottish, it appears that the fall guys, an ex Celtic manager and the current Celtic captain, are already being lined up…
Anyhoo, as its international week, the papers need to fill space, and its time to play
Sell A Celt
A competition within the media that up until now has been kept secret has finally been exposed after a journalist left his entry form on a bus.
We’ll keep an eye on the entries this week, as there’s sure to be some crackers… such as this one, from the Express, a paper still clinging onto the newstands despite a freakish obsession with cold winters and immigrants.