Clubs’ stance nowhere near pitch perfect
PLAYERS SUFFERING ON POOR SURFACES
WE’RE fiddling over seating plans while the national game burns. And ignoring those on the frontline because their opinions are just plain inconvenient.
Infuriating? It’s enough to make a saint kick in a stained glass window in a frenzy of frazzled frustration. Look, nobody is saying we
shouldn’t have the discussion about Hampden, Murrayfield and all other options.
When the SFA gather a week today for The Big Decision, we will all be agog with interest. But it’s hard to pretend that this is the most pressing issue facing Scottish football.
At a time when knees are being wrenched by drastic plastic pitches, gentle financial arm-twisting by the rugger chaps and open bartering with the Queen’s Park custodians feels like a distraction.
In an era where professional footballers have to beg for their opinions to be heard on a major health-and-safety issue, could it be that we’re overlooking the really important stuff?
That’s a category, incidentally, that must include another youth development ‘revolution’ whose only measurable achievement, to date, has been to kill the ambitions of some clubs with proven track records of elite-level talent production. Very distressing. Starting with the most pressing and timely issue first, it’s astonishing that anyone should even have to make the argument for safer, sounder and more suitable playing surfaces in the Scottish professional game.
PFA Scotland’s repeated pleas for its members’ views to be taken on board, a cry uttered more in hope than expectation, must strike any sane observer as a damning indictment of clubs. T HE guys who risk their careers on these surfaces, both artificial and natural, were polled last season — and delivered a dismal verdict on certain pitches.
In case you missed it, they gave the plastic at Rugby Park and Hamilton extremely low marks on all fronts. Killie’s was voted third worst of all 42 senior clubs… and the Accies came dead bottom of the pile.
So the SPFL responded by letting newly-promoted Premiership club Livingston install an artificial pitch of their own. It’s almost as if the league deliberately went out of their way to troll the professional footballers plying their trade here.
Look, you don’t have to be a Luddite to believe that the issue of artificial turf needs to be reconsidered — if only as part of a wider debate about pitch standards across the board.
If we can demand certain stadia criteria of clubs, how hard would it be to expand current regulations to cover things like the amount of grass on a natural surface or required levels of investment in upkeep, whether you’ve got real turf or fake?
As for the argument that the plastic pitches all pass FIFA tests, well, that’s a good starting point. But it shouldn’t end all arguments. Spending some time speaking to one of the testing experts this week, chat inevitably turned to injuries.
While the specialist would argue all day long that there is nothing more inherently dangerous about artificial pitches regularly described as ‘grippy’ or ‘sticky’ by pros, he does concede that we’ve not had nearly enough analysis of the raw data.
When FIFA produced a report saying there was no discernible difference in injury occurrence between natural and unnatural turf, they were showing us nothing but a snap shot.
In response, anyone who saw Jamie Murphy crumple to the deck in such innocuous circumstances last Sunday could offer their own fairly conclusive series of screen grabs.
The failures of governance don’t start and stop at ignoring the politely-expressed concerns of the footballers themselves, of course.
Spending an hour with former First Minister — and ex-SFA report writer — Henry McLeish yesterday merely confirmed a few things about the much-vaunted Project Brave.
Yes, McLeish has a book to sell. But it’s hard to ignore his assertion that, eight years on from promising to implement his findings, the SFA have gone in exactly the opposite direction to his recommendations for youth development.
Project Brave’s criteria for granting elite status seems to amount, effectively, to having deep enough pockets.
Clubs responsible for the nurturing of current Scotland internationals were simply overlooked.
And it can’t be right that both Livingston and Falkirk — each excellent examples of how to do it properly — have scrapped their youth academies altogether.
They aren’t the only clubs to retreat from the business of bringing through future stars.
With Hamilton left nursing a grievance over the low six-figure sum they’ve received for Lewis Ferguson, complaining that the tribunal in question won’t even go public with their reasoning, it occasionally looks as if disdain is the only reward for doing the right thing.
Unless that changes, more teams will ditch their programmes. And that will definitely have an effect on quality.
Eventually, it might even make it harder for the super-charged marketing department at Murrayfield to sell all 67,000 tickets for those big Scotland qualifiers.