The mood on George Street is grim these days. A last days of Rome malaise is starting to emerge amongst the harried and fearful workers of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS as they flit from brasserie to bar, unsure where their next Christmas bonus will come from; heck, whether there will even be a Christmas bonus. Times are hard for the twin behemoths of Scottish finance and their employees, but their fall from grace amidst plummeting world markets is increasingly symptomatic of a nation whose tumble back into our traditional pessimism has been supported step-by-faltering-step by the recent failures of the national side.
In economic terms Scottish football is in a depression. The woeful performance of our club teams in Europe this season has already been widely reported. The national team is suffering a more lingering decline. The emphatic 3-1 victory over Ukraine at Hampden in the last qualifying campaign was a full year ago now and is beginning to seem an even more distant memory. Since then the Scotland team have recorded just one win in eight games, and even that a narrow and somewhat fortuitous 2-1 victory over the mighty Iceland. Meanwhile, the insipid Scotland squad have been tramping despondently across Europe falling victim to international football lightweights such as Georgia and Macedonia.
Our rise to prominence in the FIFA rankings – only one position behind England as recently as September – has been swiftly curtailed as we hurtled steeply downwards at the last update from 16th to 26th.
The justification for that ranking is looking increasingly thin. Wins at home and away against France in the last few years came amidst a general optimism in the country that saw a competent bunch of players vastly exceed reasonable expectations.
The miserable years of Berti Vogts had been consigned to the history books and in charge of the national team stood first Walter Smith, widely respected by at least one half of the Scottish football establishment, and when he somewhat controversially abandoned the national team mid-campaign in favour of a second spell at Rangers Alex McLeish accepted the responsibility of attempting to lead the national team to Austria and Switzerland. Both managers were tactically diligent and ensured that they got the most out of the limited pool of talent available to them. A sensational string of results were based upon tactical conservatism, a rigid 4-5-1 formation and the occasional burst of brilliance from James McFadden.
Of course, we all know the road to Euro 2008 ended in tears against Italy. To us Scots, it was a reminder that we are forever doomed to be heroic failures. What could be more typical, we muttered darkly, than the manner in which Italy rode their luck in putting an end to our stubborn resistance. Meanwhile, Alex McLeish followed Walter’s example and politely excused himself from the Scotland hotseat, slinking down to England to mastermind Birmingham’s relegation to the Championship. The sense of anti-climax was palpable, but the optimism that had driven Scotland’s remarkable campaign still existed.
Top-class players like Craig Gordon and Alan Hutton were evidence enough that Scotland had come a long way from the dark days of scouring the English lower leagues for faux-Scots like Robbie Stockdale and Paul Devlin. But it was inevitable that depression would set in before long; to come so close to qualifying in a group that contained both the previous World Cup finalists and missing out by the thinnest of margins was a bitter pill to swallow for the success-starved Tartan Army.
The appointment of George Burley as Alex McLeish’s successor was divisive from the start. Burley has never been without his detractors in Scotland and in a close-fought race for the job with Graeme Souness many in the media and Tartan Army felt the SFA had made a rash decision to snub the vastly experienced Souness. Burley himself has proved an odd character; a scrupulously polite and genial man, he nevertheless gives off an air of vague indifference that has endeared him to very few who do not know him personally. Those who do, and those who work with him, tend to insist Burley is a superb manager and a pleasure to work alongside. The recent decisions of Ranger’s strikers Kris Boyd and Lee McCulloch to retire from international football – in Boyd’s case, with the explicit condition that he would happily return as soon as Burley had left the set-up – seem to suggest that viewpoint might not be so widely shared.
None of that would matter if Burley was the success we all hoped he would be. We relished the prospect of attacking football after years of dour defensive displays, but perhaps wiser hands might have asked why we were endorsing such a radical change of direction. We needed some wag to shout out, “Haw, Burley. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it?” No one did.
From the get go Burley’s attacking football has carried more than a whiff of denial about it, his 4-3-3 looking more like 4-1-4-1 and unable to deliver many goals either. Failure to score in a home friendly against Northern Ireland and in a 1-0 away defeat to Macedonia, leaving Burley without a win in his first four games, finally set alarm bells ringing.
While the 2-1 victory in Reykjavik this September alleviated some of the pressure now mounting on Burley the scoreless draw against Norway at Hampden last week was as poor a performance as any the team has put in under the new manager. Once again Burley deployed his mysterious 4-3-3 formation which predictably collapsed into a 4-1-4-1. McFadden was left hopelessly isolated upfront, bizarrely forced to field long balls that he never stood a chance of winning. Maloney and Morrison worked diligently but without reward on the wings - quite what target man they were supposed to be putting crosses into is anyone’s guess.
The second-half change to 4-4-2 was the correct move made far too late. But even in that Burley could not resist riling the Hampden faithful, substituting fans-favourite James McFadden, who despite his lonely task upfront had worked hard and looked the most likely player to forge an opening, and ignoring the prolific goalscoring presence of Kris Boyd on the bench in favour of Hib’s Steven Fletcher and the 30-year old Wolves striker Chris Iwelumo. Between them the substitutes had mustered just one cap previously.
Iwelumo’s remarkable miss just moments later – a two foot tap in that he somehow skewed past the left post – will no doubt haunt both Burley and Iwelumo’s dreams for many years to come. Had it gone in, as it surely must have if Iwelemu were ever given the chance again, Burley’s substitution would have been hailed as a masterstoke, his snubs to Boyd and McFadden forgotten. In the event it didn’t, and the scrutiny that Burley now faces is more than deserved.
There is a whiff of Berti Vogts about Burley’s recent performance. The call-up of the 30-year old Chris Iwelemu cannot fail to evoke comparisons with Berti’s tenure, when the hapless German called up a string of in-form journeyman strikers such as Dougie Freedman and Stevie Crawford with notoriously poor results. Still more Berti-esque was the bemusement on the faces of the Tartan Army at Burley’s selection and subs. His insistence after the game that his players had played well and, even more oddly, that he got his tactics correct smacked of the sort of incompetent denial employed extensively by Vogts.
Scotland’s sails may be flapping in the wind right now, but a kind wind might yet steer us out of our footballing doldrums. We still have to face both Norway and Macedonia and victories in those fixtures would probably steer us to 2nd spot, but that alone is unlikely to give the points total required to be one of the best placed runners-up and recipient of a play-off spot.
More intriguingly we are still to cross swords with the qualifying group’s top seeds the Netherlands, and Scotland are infamous for reserving their best performances for when they are hefty underdogs.
Yet the prevailing mood inside Hampden and the George Street haunts of the employees of Scottish banks remains the same. A nervous optimism, a faint hope that all is not quite as bad as it appears. Optimism, however, has rarely sat well on Scottish shoulders, and with the onset of winter the cold fingers of pessimism are closing in on Scottish hearts once again.
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