Deadline day is national strain
UNSETTLING. Unnerving. Utterly irresponsible. And a sign of just how much the club game has managed to cow and subjugate national — and international — associations into doing whatever they damned well demand.
The great imbalance within the beautiful game, the glaring disparity between professional teams and countries eager to keep them happy, may never be more obvious than over the coming few days.
Because, on Thursday night, while players all over Europe are supposed to be either playing in or making final preparations for crucial World Cup qualifiers, it’s a fair bet that a sizeable number of those footballers will be fielding calls from agents, coping with life-changing decisions — or even getting whisked away for medical examinations before the closing of the transfer window.
Allowing such a scenario to fall at the business end of a FIFAdesignated ‘international week’, those precious few days when countries are supposed to have players all to themselves, makes a mockery of the idea that playing for your nation — even when a place at a major finals is at stake — actually matters to the people running the game.
Scotland coaches have grown used to this in recent years, of course. It comes with the territory.
And the prospect of John McGinn, a fringe player in Gordon Strachan’s squad, being hauled off before boarding Thursday’s flight to Lithuania — a possibility if Nottingham Forest meet Hibs’ valuation for the midfielder — to complete his ‘dream move’ to the English Championship would hardly represent a major blow.
But what if Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho decides, on Thursday morning, that he’d really like to get Kieran Tierney right now, rather than later? Who makes that call? The very principle of the thing, the idea that a must-win game for Scotland, Slovenia, Slovakia or any other nation could be disrupted in this manner, cannot be accepted as merely one of those things.
It’s wrong, it’s potentially very disruptive. And it tells us everything about FIFA and UEFA’s ability to govern with even a pretence of authority.
Not that this should come as any surprise. Certainly not to any of the Scotland players — those who make the trip — forced to play on a plastic surface best described as uncomfortable at the LFF stadium on Friday night.
Seriously. Is it asking too much for European football’s governing body to make some minimum requirement on pitch standards for their flagship international competition? It’s not just the fact that Scotland will play their first ever competitive fixture on artificial turf. That was going to happen, sooner or later.
But the feedback from those who have played on this particular patch of green is that, to be blunt, it’s a stinker. Hard, uneven, with freakish bounces.
If the point of artificial pitches is to reduce the vagaries of playing on roughed-up mud slicks or sticky cabbage patches, how hard is it to set some measurable standards? Scotland need no other invitation to slip up having put themselves on an uncertain footing — in terms of qualification — all on their own.
The fact that Friday’s fixture is readily accepted by all as a ‘must win’ game says everything about the campaign to date.
We’ve reached the stage where a majority are actually pretty pleased if we head into the final couple of fixtures with at least a ‘mathematical’ chance of making the play-offs. As the best sixth-placed team, by virtue of our corner count.
Should Strachan’s boys fail to beat Lithuania, next Monday’s home clash with mighty Malta could be a little flat, certainly.
It might even be the end for the head coach himself; it would be hard to portray such an early failure to qualify as anything but a blow to his credibility.
The hope is, of course, that such a fate can be averted. That, for a little while longer, we’re allowed to dream — or pretend to dream — of a return to the big time.
Yet many have already decided that continuing to measure the health of this football nation purely by the success/failure of the Scotland team is, to put it frankly, a mug’s game. They’ve decided to look elsewhere for signs of hope.
Taking their argument at face value, it’s hard to deny that we are blessed with a lively and vibrant — if far from perfect — professional game.
At the grass roots, too, any glance at any public park across the country on any given weekend will be rewarded with the sight of hundreds of kids working under dozens of volunteer coaches, all doing their best to improve.
Our love of football, the game itself, is as undiminished as ever. It’s our affection for the national team that occasionally waxes and wanes.
When you look at how FIFA and UEFA treat the countries ostensibly under their umbrella, is it any wonder?