Window not what it was cracked up to be
For the past year, we’ve had the best minds our clubs could provide sitting around a table trying to find a long- term pathway for Scottish football.
In January? They all just run around with their hair on fire, ignoring every word of it in favour of short- term, foot-shooting stupidity.
Honestly, this transfer window should be abolished.
All it ever does is expose most clubs’ strategic weaknesses, lack of imagination or foresight and, in most cases, sheer desperation.
Look at the business some of them have done. Scottish Premiership teams have brought in 43 players.
There’s been signings from Charlton, Shrewsbury Town, Oldham, Sheffield United and Port Vale in League One.
Players have been recruited from Cambridge United, Crawley Town, Mansf ield Town, Portsmouth and Plymouth in League Two.
They’ve come from Forest Green Rovers in the National League and even Bluebell United in the Leinster Senior League, Ireland’s third tier.
Nine of the 43, more than a fifth of them, are recycled – players who’ve been in Scotland before and now come back.
You could understand that if they’d been roaring success stories first time round but they are more likely signings defined by the nonexistent scouting infrastructure of most clubs.
Only six of the 43 were signed from Scottish clubs, three of them being loans from Celtic.
Only seven of the 43 are Scottish, including two of the three Celtic kids.
Only two of the 43 are Scottish and under-21 – Jamie McCart and Zak Jules.
But it’s only when you start peeling back the layers and looking at the underlying issues involved, that you begin to realise how few of the clubs actually have a plan in place for themselves to move forward.
We’ll exclude Celtic, because right now that’s patently not the case under Brendan Rodgers. Everyone else though? Let’s take Mark Warburton, since he’s in the spotlight after Rangers’ 4-1 roasting by Hearts in midweek.
He’s brought in Emerson Hyndman, who looks a serious player by the way.
But taking him off because the pitch was heavy and he has a responsibility to his parent club Bournemouth?
Are you kidding? Rangers fans must be going mental, hearing that.
If you can’t put your needs ahead of theirs, don’t take a player on loan. It’s your job, your team, your neck.
Then again, the Rangers manager keeps trying to tell us that there’s nothing short-term about bringing in guys like Hyndman or Jon Toral on loan until the end of the season.
That if he does well by them, he’ll get the next guy and the next one after that.
But this one’s a creative midfielder – what if the next guy Eddie Howe wants you take is a left-back?
Do you bin your captain? That’s not a long-term development strategy for a team – that’s buying lottery tickets.
Which is maybe what Hearts have done as well with some of theirs.
Nine arrived at Tynecastle last month, although clearly a few of them are quality. Most are there to get the club to the summer and buy Ian Cathro time.
But Hearts now have 16 different nationalities in their squad and seem to have drifted away from the grand plan they were selling two years ago.
Sure, if they keep pulling up trees the way they did on Wednesday, no one will care – but the long-term ramifications of this window will be interesting.
It’s the rest of the league, though. If recruitment is the key we all think it is, then God help the managers.
Let ’ s take a few at random, without being seen to be picking on clubs.
Who knows? One new recruit might be the guy who scores the goal that saves his club from relegation or gets them into the top six.
In which case they’ll be hai led a success story instead of the Hail Mary pass they invariably were as the clock ticked down.
Henrik Ojamaa? Only made three starts all season for the team anchored at the bottom of the Dutch Eredivisie, Go Ahead Eagles. Dundee are his fifth club in two-and-a-half years.
New team-mate Marc Klok? Six games for Ross County, two years in the Bulgarian league and, this season, 10 games for an Oldham side doomed to relegation from League One.
Oscar Gobern at Ross County. Played 40 games in three seasons for five different clubs in three different divisions. Definition of a journeyman.
Killie were busy. Seven signings. But let’s look at Karleigh Osborne, 28, the fourth-choice centre-back for Plymouth in League Two.
In his first two games, he sold the jerseys with a penalty in the last minute to send Kilmarnock out of the Scottish Cup then the following week he was hooked after half an hour before he got sent off.
What about Henri Anier at Inverness? Scuf f led through spells at Dundee United and Hibs after leaving Motherwell for the third tier in Germany.
He finally washed up at Kalmar in Sweden where he managed nine games and a single goal in the 2016 season.
Billy Mckay will be right alongside him. Mckay was a hero at Caley Thistle the first time around.
But he hasn’t scored a single league goal in England since he left two years ago, including a 26-game barren run for Oldham this season.
Six of his 13 goals for Dundee United came from the penalty spot last year as
Our clubs turn to a force of bang average pros – what an admission of defeat
well. He and Anier, amongst others, combined to get United relegated.
Are we getting the dri ft of the debate here?
Are we really at a point in our football evolution where we’re incapable of rearing players who are the equal of, or better than, any or all of the above?
Do we have so little faith in what we’re producing that we’re not prepared to give any of the hundreds of development players we have a chance to shine?
Instead our clubs turn to a force of bang-average jobbing pros most of whom, let’s not forget, have arrived here because they couldn’t get a game where they were.
What an admission of defeat. What a sorry representation of all the work that goes in, that this is the best we can do for our fans, our coaches, our players.
Needs must, they’ll tell us. Managers are under pressure, right? So they’re short-term fixes, but aren’t they always?
Our Performance Strategy Working Group have come up with a plan to produce more, better Scottish players.
Their problem – further evidenced by the January sales shambles – is that if clubs and managers don’t believe in giving any of it a crack, it’ll never fly.
And if they don’t realise they’re the biggest part of our long-term problem, how will we ever get round to fixing it?