Maybe it's just Charlie Adam's fault.
The, shall we say, rotund midfielder came on as a half-time substitute for Scott Brown in Cardiff last October, when Scotland were 1-0 up. We went on to lose 2-1 (with Adam one of those culpable for Gareth Bale's winning goal, letting the Spurs star ghost past him without the slightest attempt at a challenge). Five months later, Gordon Strachan brought Adam off the bench 63 minutes into the return game. As before, we were 1-0 ahead. As before, we lost 2-1.
Maybe it's just Charlie Adam's fault. But it's probably not.
It's not difficult to argue that Scotland's national team are at it's worst ever ebb. Our start to the 2014 World Cup qualifiers has been so poor that a negative result in Serbia may actually make us the first European side mathematically eliminated from qualification...and that's with four games still to go. At the time of writing, our FIFA world ranking is 66, just behind Albania and Libya. Whilst these rankings have always been justifiably taken with a pinch of salt, it may be possible that, right now, they are fairly accurate - or even generous to us. We are only the 31st ranked European country - which means you wouldn't bet on us to qualify for the 24 team Euro 2016.
It's not as if this has been a brief dip. Just look at our results in competitive games since Alex McLeish left the manager's post in November 2007 (friendly results are worth about as much as a bank account in Cyprus, whatever Craig Levein claims). We won only three of eight 2010 World Cup qualifiers under George Burley, beating Iceland twice and Macedonia at home. Craig Levein took charge of twelve competitive games, and won only three - two of which were against Liechtenstein. Since that epic night in Paris, some five and a half years ago, we have won only two away qualifiers, and have lost on our travels to the likes of Georgia, Macedonia and Wales.
One of the Scottish red-tops ran with the headline 'Brutal' on Saturday morning after the Wales reverse. That sounds like the perfect one word description for our national team.
As regards the Wales game, it wasn't just the result that was so shocking. We were utterly outplayed by a country which has a population half the size of ours, and who don't even consider football to be their national sport. Aside from Cardiff City and Swansea City, both in the English league pyramid, Welsh football clubs either play in a domestic competition which is probably weaker than the Scottish first division, or in the English non-leagues. Despite this, they could boast players like Bale, Arsenal's Aaron Ramsey, Liverpool's Joe Allen and Swansea defenders Ben Davies and Ashley Williams.
What Gordon Strachan would have given for a player like Williams in our backline. On a recent SPL Podcast, we reminisced about Craig Brown's Scotland side that went to Euro 96 and France 98 with a back three of Tom Boyd, Colin Hendry and Colin Calderwood. On Friday night, our central defenders were Grant Hanley, of Blackburn Rovers, and Wigan's Gary Caldwell. Caldwell hasn't been a regular recently. Hanley, despite scoring, played like a man who has walked into several walls during his life - which is somewhat fitting as he also looks like a man who has walked into several walls during his life.
Further up the pitch, the visitors showed a willingness and ability to pass the ball around, play a patient possession game, and wait for us to lose our shape and/or our discipline. If we had been 2-0 down at half-time, we could hardly have complained. Take away a bright 15 minutes at the start of the second half, and otherwise the Welsh were rampant. It's hardly an exaggeration to claim we were unable to put two passes together; depressingly, that seemed to be part of a gameplan that belonged to the 1970s - punt long balls and kick anything that moves. Hanley and James McArthur, among others had escaped punishment for some very robust tackles long before Robert Snodgrass deservedly got a second yellow card when giving away a penalty.
There are some mitigating circumstances - we were without Darren Fletcher, Scott Brown and James Morrison in midfield, while Steven Fletcher had barely touched the ball before going off with an injured ankle. But the Welsh played the first half with a clearly ill and out-of-sorts Gareth Bale, and without their talisman for the entire second period. And they still looked far superior.
From Gordon Strachan's point of view, he at least has time. Not even the greatest optimist in the Tartan Army gave us a chance of qualifying from this group after the mess his predecessor left him. So a few dodgy results at the beginning will be forgiven. But is there hope for the future?
As I stated above, the problem is long-standing. The fact is that Wales are producing far superior players than we are. Making it to the under 19 European Championship final in 2006 has translated into diddly squat - only five players have gone on to be capped for Scotland and one was, for the love of god, Garry Kenneth (Snodgrass, Graham Dorrans and Steven Fletcher, who started on Friday, plus Lee Wallace are the other four). It's hard to feel excited about the current under 21 squad, and I live in fear that the exciting Somali-born Chelsea prodigy Islam Feruz will turn his back on us at senior level. It's happened before, after all - arguably the two technically most gifted Scottish players since the millennium - Aiden McGeady and James McCarthy - chose to represent Ireland instead.
The national team's loss of prestige - after all, it is now more than 15 years since we last qualified for a major tournament - coincides nicely with the steady decline in the quality of the domestic league. Celtic have given Scottish football a bit of a boost with their Champions League run this year, but in coefficient the Scottish league ranks just twenty-fourth in Europe, behind the likes of Israel and Belarus. Aside from Celtic, the other Scottish clubs have managed to win just one of the 10 European ties (going by results over two legs) played over the last two seasons.
Ladies and gentlemen, I put it to you that Scottish football, domestic and international, is, frankly, crap.
What needs to be done? Maybe a great big investment in infrastructure, in pitches, in coaching, might reap some reward. But the SFA claim to be doing that, and it's making zero difference so far. Performance director Mark Wotte is the poor sod tasked with job of making a purse out of a sow's ear. As for the clubs, the sheer presence of the English Premier League next door sucks away interest from the SPL, leading to a TV deal that is worth frankly peanuts compared to that available to leagues such as Norway and Greece. There's no obvious solution to that.
Is there any way of turning this around? I'm not convinced there is. For all the talk of reconstruction rescuing Scottish clubs, I see only an inexorable decline whatever the league structure they choose. With the clubs either too poor or too incompetent to produce talented youngsters, the only hope is that the best Scots get snapped up by English clubs and trained by them, much in the way the best Welsh players have been. Maybe it's time to accept that our clubs, aside from the Old Firm (if they manage to escape us) will never return to the levels they once were at. Maybe it's time to accept that our national team is down at the levels of a Macedonia or an Albania, where, barring the lucky emergence of a Golden Generation and/or a freak set of results, we will never make it to a major tournament again.
Football has moved on, and Scotland has been left behind, with increasingly little hope of catching up.
L.
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