DON OF A NEW ERA? DON’T COUNT ON IT, ALEX
YOU know we are a nation clutching at straws when the only thing our finest footballing brain can muster to inspire confidence in winning at Wembley is something that happened in what now seems like a different lifetime.
‘They’ll do well, Scotland. They will be fine,’ said Sir Alex Ferguson when pressed on his assertion that the need to defeat England in 12 days’ time to shore up a crumbling World Cup qualifying campaign was ‘no problem’.
‘If you go back to the European Championship a few years ago, they went down there and were very, very unlucky.’
That was 1999. We’d given reigning champions Brazil a game in the World Cup finals the year before. Sir Alex’s beloved Labour Party, currently making Scottish football look a Xanadu of unity and common purpose, pulled the strings in Holyrood with the Lib Dems after the inaugural parliamentary elections.
It was, in all kinds of sporting and societal ways, a parallel universe from the present day. Ferguson even published an autobiography that year, describing Gordon Strachan as a man who ‘could not be trusted an inch’.
Nice then, that, having clearly let bygones be bygones, he felt compelled to offer the national coach a show of support after they had posed together on the Clydeside to promote the 13-city, fan-unfriendly abomination that is Euro 2020.
The only problem is that, no matter how vulnerable the current England side may be, it has clearly become impossible to make a coherent case for Scotland taking three points in London.
Scott Brown’s prospective return for that fixture is hardly reason to take the ceremonial sabre to your best bottle of Prestige Cuvee.
Understandable as the temptation to select him is, particularly given the rising injury count, it is a sad indictment of how far the national team has fallen that certain players now appear free to pick and choose when they fancy playing for it.
We shall no doubt be treated to many breathless accounts in the coming fortnight of how Brown has re-energised the same camp he captained to Euro 2016 failure.
Fair play to those in the squad who have kept turning up through thick and thin, fielding all the flak in the three months since he walked away, if they really do welcome him back with open hearts for the glamour game of the section, though.
One of them, after all, will have to give Brown his place. Darren Fletcher may also have to return the armband. Here’s hoping, after all this, that the Celtic skipper will opt to stick around if we get thumped.
It is certainly difficult, Brown back in the ranks or not, to hold on to any of the optimism that followed a decent second half in the 5-1 win over Malta on the opening day.
Stewart Regan, on a rare day out from the bunker, turned up during the week to have a go all the same. The SFA chief executive joined Sir Alex in referencing that Don Hutchison-inspired 1-0 win from 17 years ago, which still ended with a 2-1 aggregate defeat in the Euro 2000 play-offs.
He also pointed to the fact that ‘anyone can take points off anyone else in this group’. We did scrape a draw at home to Lithuania with a late goal, I suppose. Unfortunately, the only team we have, so far, proved ourselves capable of beating are the Maltese.
That last double-header against the Lithuanians and Slovakia was just painful, a depressing 180minutes of watching a set-up that once showed such exciting promise lose its way completely.
Of course, it is easy to question what you see with your own eyes in the current climate of Scottish football. It can often be as great an example of post-truth society as anything served up by Donald Trump’s campaign or printed on the side of a Brexit battlebus.
Look at Rangers. Pounded in the Old Firm cup game, five wins from 11 in the league on the country’s second-biggest budget and their manager is insisting that they aren’t doing too badly for a team that has just been promoted. It is hard to imagine that 95 per cent of fans remain behind Mark Warburton’s project.
Likewise, while Brown’s U-turn will undoubtedly strengthen the side given his current form, there is surely a section of the Tartan Army unconvinced by his reappearance just two weeks after he’d purred that putting Celtic above his country was an inspired decision.
Establishing the exact truth of what has brought him back to the dark blue might be tricky. Brown sat in a press conference on Thursday, as his return was being negotiated, and assured reporters that he would be watching the England match on the telly.
Mark McGhee, the Scotland assistant, insists the player instigated the move. Whatever the background, it just adds to the general sense that we have reached desperation stakes.
This is a final throw of the dice. Once in a blue moon, such an act comes up trumps. More often than not, it completes the descent to rockbottom. Does it make you feel ready to party like it’s 1999? Me neither.