I've barely posted in months so here's all my opinions from then rolled into one on this topic:
You could say Scottish Football is at an all time low, it has been getting that way for a long time. Coaches are encouraging athleticism just as much as footballing ability, the referees are rank, the prices are too high, the entertainment is scarce.
You see referees getting punished in other countries, but here is seems any publicity is good publicity. If you hear of a referee having a howler, more often than not he'll continue to get an SPL game every week after it. I remember one incident last season, Neil Warnock was managing Crystal Palace at the time, I think it was against Bristol City. The ball hit the back of the net and came back out, and the ref never gave a goal. If I remember correctly the goal had a direct effect on the game, and Palace were angry and rightly so. The referee and his linesman were both suspended for two weeks. I know that was an extreme incident, but I think that being introduced in Scotland wouldn't be an at all bad thing. I know most referees don't struggle for a day job, when you hear of them being Financial Advisors, Lawyers but I'm sure they would notice £1,600 being missing due to there competency levels being unacceptable, these would soon rise.
I'm not saying Celtic were justified in their conspiracy theories, not in the slightest, but if you ask me the result of Dougie MacDonald admitting he's lying should have resulted in the referees being more closely watched, not them spitting the dummy about people questioning their integrity. Decisions, maybe not of that calibre but certainly not much worse happen for teams like St. Mirren, Hamilton and Inverness on a weekly basis. No one is out to get Celtic, the standard on a whole is just so bad, it's just the nature of football that the bigger the club, the more publicised the decision will be.
If one of your colleagues admits he has covered something up, people will question your intergrity, it's inevitable, it's only human. If the referee's were all so concerned about their reputation's being tarnished they should have called for MacDonald's head. But they didn't because if you ask me, they have all either lied before or will lie in the future. I see today that O'Riley has said Jennings was sent off for foul and abusive language, but we clearly see the red card was out before Jenno could say anything. While that's not a bare-faced lie, it's bending the truth slightly. If I was sent off for tapping a ref on the shoulder, I'm sure I speak for 99% of men who have played a game of competitive football in their life when I say that I would have followed that up by saying something foul or abusive to the referee. This is yet another blatant cover up.
Being only 20, I'm a relatively new supporter, I started going to the games in 1996/97, which I think has coincided with the decline of the game. Our National Team has gone it's longest in history without a major tournament, and I think a lot of that has to be attributed to what happened the last time we reached one. Post World Cup 1998, our team had badly stagnated and we could barely freshen it up due to Brown bicking the majority of the same players throughout his period in charge. Adding Gary Naysmith, Barry Ferguson and Billy Dodds to that ageing group of players was hardly going to stop us from the slump. Berti Vogts is criticised for his time as Scotland manager, and rightly so but part of me feels sorry for him as to how little he actually did inherit from Brown's era.
Ever since, the way the SFA has been coaching youngsters has had a knock on effect on the poor standard of player we are seeing now. It seems now players are being coached too heavily on the likes of athleticism and versatility, without a thought to technique and ability. If a player can run a marathon but he can't trap a ball and play a five-yard pass there's something wrong. As for versatility, as Cloudy touched on in a previous thread, you would never catch Barca playing Xavi out wide, but here in Scotland you see players like your Fitzpatrick's, your McGarry's who are "decent" at several positions but not brilliant in any. Then you get the opposite end of the spectrum, someone like Ross Forbes, who has genuine ability as a creative midfielder, is shunned out wide, like a fish out of water, which he doesn't have the attributes to play. That almost shows that we reward versatility and treat it better than we do ability. I'm not that naive to think that most teams, especially a team of our calibre can afford to have a natural back up in every position, but it's plain to see how the likes of Sutton and Murphy are far more effective through the middle than they are out wide, although both of them put in a shift etc.
Craig Levein being in charge of our National Team is also something that scares me. Speaking from experience, Scotland are going to have to soak up pressure from a lot of international teams, but the way he deployed us both in Kaunas and in Prague was shocking. Czech Republic are a team currently going through what I mentioned above, that we went through post World Cup 98. The likes of Poborsky, Nedved and Koller are gone without replacements of a similar calibre, those are teams we should be looking at being better than and beating home and away, not playing without a striker against. We have a similar population to Holland, when you look at the players they produce compared to players we produce, you think we would maybe take a leaf out their book. For example, they play Van Bommell as a midfield anchor, an established player in that position who has spent his career at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, whereas we play Lee McCulloch there who has reinvented himself several times over the course of his career, not looking natural in any position along the way.
Last night if I was a Hearts fan I wouldn't even have given going to the game as much as an afterthought, as I was saying to the folk I sit with at the games, less than two weeks before Christmas, freezing night, can catch every kick on the telly, twenty quid out your pocket. As much as the television era is making football suffer, I do contribute to it. I do go to a number of away games every year, but television leads me to pick and choose, albeit we aren't away from home on the tv very often, but knowing I could catch the game would lead me to save my money for a game that I wouldn't be able to see. As much as television detracts from attendances, the extra money given to clubs as a result makes you wonder how it would balance out.
Despite all the above, I can't see a time when I would ever stop going to see Motherwell, home games especially, not that a narrow defeat could tip me over the edge anyway. My job for about a year meant I had to work just about every Saturday, this was torture when I saw or heard people going to Fir Park. If a games on at Fir Park and I'm not there it just doesn't feel right. As much as the game can be boring, flat, monotonous even painful I can't imagine not being there. If I'm watching a game on tv, if the standard isn't up to much I'll turn it off and do something else, but with Motherwell it goes far beyond entertainment. Maybe I've just not been suffering for as long as you lot, but I can't ever see myself "not renewing".
