Weight of hype could crush John Fleck

To paraphrase Star Wars, "Help me, John Fleck, you're my only hope", seems to be the increasingly prominent feeling amongst Rangers and Scotland fans. At least Walter Smith and the Ibrox management team have tried to play down comparisons with Wayne Rooney - true, they both look like they come from a couple of rungs down the evolutionary ladder - but now it seems George Burley has jumped on the bandwagon.

The reason for all the hype, I think, is less because Fleck could be the most precocious Scottish footballing talent in a good long while, and more because he is an attacking player. Ultimately, since Kenny Dalglish, Scotland have lacked a world class striker - sorry, but while Ally McCoist was a great player, he does not rank with Kenny Dal or Denis Law - and the paucity of a goal threat has been the weak point in pretty much every Scotland team since. Frankly, most Scotland international strikers of the twenty-first century couldn't score in a brothel, where all the prostitutes were French, and where they had been badly hit by the credit crunch. And, as everyone recognises, Fleck has the potential to be that threat.

But I can't help feeling that all this attention can't be good. The young lad has made but a handful of appearances for the Huns, and nobody seems quite certain even where his best position is. And he's only seventeen - he hasn't even finished growing! We should have learned this lesson over Mark Burchill, who got similar publicity, and who now plies his trade at Rotherham United. Let's hope Fleck doesn't go down that route. He could be good enough to be a Scotland legend. But we need to keep the pressure off and wait and see, not heap the hopes of a nation on his shoulders.

L.