Our game’s in mess and review is moving as slow as a sloth with a cruciate
If deckchair shuffling was a sport, we’d be world champions.
Masters of the short- sighted, back-of-a-fag packet planning.
Our entire development strategy is up in the air. We have no performance director. Our Under-20 league is regarded by everyone within the game as unfit for purpose.
Our academy structure has been widely discredited as a charter for jersey-fillers and grant-trousering.
And the review to fix it all, nearly 18 months on and counting, is moving slower than a sloth with cruciate trouble.
The greater good, as usual, is being throttled by vested interests.
So what do we come up with? Celtic and Rangers ‘Colt’ teams in the league. It has resurfaced like the groaning old carcass of a long-sunken ship.
The idea has been accompanied by the usual lecture about how vital it is for Scottish football that the best talent has a chance to develop in a more meaningful environment – but without actually enhancing the environment as a whole and making it only for the benefit of two clubs.
In the week when the experiment of having the Premiership Colts sides in the IRN-BRU Cup ended in failure in terms of attendances and results, the move was suddenly back on the agenda.
Right in time for the fourth-round draw none of them made and with just enough room to spare to get the strings attached to SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster for his public endorsement. Coincidence? Nah, me neither.
It’s only three years since former Scottish Footbal l League chief executive David Longmuir nearly derailed the entire reconstruction process when he tried to trojan horse the idea in at the last minute to the disgust of the SFL clubs who decried him for kowtowing to the Old Firm.
Little has happened since then that will have changed opinions.
The SPFL may have squeezed the Cup changes through after recommendations made by their competitions working group went straight to the board and bypassed a full vote.
But they can’t do the same with this. Their rules state that for this level of structural change they would need the approval of 90 per cent of the Premiership – 11 of the 12 clubs – and 75 per cent of the 30 in the other three leagues. It’s as likely to happen as me being sponsored by Head & Shoulders.
Listen, there is a strong case to be made that our young players need a better environment in which to learn.
What they’re getting now is sterile and doesn’t come close to preparing them to live and win in a first team.
England are going through exactly the same thing at the moment with their academy structure.
They’ve suddenly realised playing kids your own age doesn’t prepare you and instead want them playing against hardened pros with ‘B’ teams in a new League Three. It’s pretty much what we’re saying up here.
So here’s a thought that is maybe a bit too radical for some.
Let’s call it ‘The Reserves’ and make it for everyone.
I know, I know, where do I come up with these left-field ideas, eh?
Or maybe the Old Firm could, y’know, actually commit to a strategy of playing more of the young players they spend a fortune developing in their first team?
There’s no doubt the two of them collectively still amass the best talent in the country at their age groups.
But there’s a glass ceiling for all but the exceptional. You also have to ask yourself what Colt teams in the league would look like in practice. As ever there’s not a shred of detail.
Why should it just be Celtic and Rangers for starters? How many others would want to be a part of it?
Arguably only five clubs have the resources to actually manage second teams as well as first teams.
So if you’re going to add two or four sides, how does a 12 or 14-team League Two function?
What about the likes of Spartans and East Kilbride? Are they not within their rights to question teams getting a place above them without earning it the hard way as they’ve had to?
The pyramid is supposed to be for ambitious community clubs, right? Who cares about them though? As ever the potential move is an individual kite, hung up in the wind with no notion of why other than it’s what Celtic and Rangers want.
Certain individuals will therefore do the i r be s t to facilitate it instead of truly revisiting the entire structure of the game to see how we can develop everyone’s talent, not just the Old Firm’s.
I saw a brilliant suggestion on Twitter from a guy called David Stoker, who watches more football than most of us eat meals.
He reckons that if it’s truly about the good of Scottish football and creating talent ready for a first-team environment then we should put a Scotland Colts team in the league instead of two Old Firm ones.
All clubs can contribute to it. That way the country benefits from a closeknit group of young, hungry players who are more experienced for the step into the international youth arena while the clubs reap the same rewards as well. Win-win.
But the Old Firm would run a million miles from that because unless they’re manipulating the marketplace for their own gains then they’re not interested.
They don’t care about putting the jigsaw together for the big picture. Only that they have the best pieces.
Approval is as likely to happen as me being sponsored by Head & Shoulders