‘Giving up Hampden will say we don’t care’

DITCHING Hampden would tell the world that Scotland no longer cares about its national team, according to the man who penned the SFA’s own most in-depth review of the sport. Former First Minister Henry McLeish, still armed with a long wish list of changes for Scottish football despite claims that his 2010 report has already been implemented, does not see much right with the national game ‘going nowhere’ because of vested interests. But the one thing he would not change is the venue for Scotland’s biggest international matches. Aware of Murrayfield’s continued pitch for business, McLeish said: ‘I think Hampden should be symbolic of our national football pride. If you give up your national stadium, you are sending out a lot of signals that you don’t care.’ McLeish, who believes the Project Brave youth revolution currently being rolled out goes directly against the key recommendations of his review published eight years ago, has spent the past four years writing a new book on the subject. This morning, he will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on his latest work Scottish Football: Requiem or Renaissance? Speaking in the capital yesterday, McLeish warned that Scotland had become ‘a nation of diminishing football expectations’. And he insisted: ‘What’s happened to Scottish football isn’t an act of God. It’s not like an earthquake. It’s been caused by decisions we’ve taken. We fell off a cliff in the mid-1990s and we’re still falling. This crisis is made in Scotland, by Scots.’ Much of McLeish’s arguments focus on a ‘power grab’ by the big clubs following the creation of the SPFL — and the need, as he sees it, for the SFA to become the ‘supreme authority’. He complains about a ‘medieval voting system’ that is ‘rigged’ against the smaller clubs.