How can Shelley Kerr survive Scotland’s abject failure?
NO cheap jokes here, please. No sleekit wisecracks about Shelley Kerr listening to Celtic boss Neil Lennon detail how to cling on to your job after turning a team full of high-end players into low-grade flops and then bellowing: ‘Hold my beer’.
If only someone else had held her beer — or her wine or whatever it was — ahead of that fateful team meeting in the chaotic aftermath of committing footballing hara-kiri in the World Cup last year, we might not be here today, discussing how on earth she is still head coach of the Scotland women’s team.
To term the national side’s failed Euro 2022 qualifying campaign — topped off by a last-gasp loss to Finland at Easter Road on Tuesday — as a disaster is hardly over-egging the pudding.
Scotland were top seeds. Even now, the FIFA world rankings rate them 21st, with group rivals Finland at 30 and Portugal a lowly 32. The starting line-up against Anna Signeul’s little-fancied side was choc-full of players from the English Super League.
Talk all you like about them dominating games and failing to turn chances into goals, but the realities are clear. They were beaten home and away by the Finns and lost in Portugal. They didn’t score once. That’s not bad luck. It is nothing to do with Kerr missing in self-isolation. It is failure, in sporting terms, on a very large scale.
Fair play to Lisa Evans of Arsenal for coming out afterwards and admitting as much.
It will be interesting to see whether one of the players telling it like it is will mark some kind of stepchange in the way the women’s game is regarded and discussed in this country.
We have an entire team of players performing at the top level with their clubs. Against that backdrop, there should be certain expectations placed upon them and their coaching staff.
Do those expectations exist, though? Is there really any commitment to excellence within the Scottish FA? The fact that it took them more than a year from qualifying for the World Cup to start their ‘comprehensive review’ of the women’s game — an attempt to work out how the prize money could be spent — suggests it has never been a top priority.
The handling of the fall-out from the World Cup was dreadful, too. Having already lost in frustrating fashion to England and Japan, the loss of three goals in the last 16 minutes to Argentina, a team that didn’t even have an official ranking the year before, to draw 3-3 and exit the tournament was bad enough.
Kerr’s BBC interview, broadcast two months later, to admit to having ‘a few drinks’ before a squad debrief the day after — a meeting which reportedly left players in tears — was car-crash material.
It didn’t sound much like an apology. She did say she would go back and ‘do things differently’, but that was just one rare moment of clarity within an arrogant hotchpotch of buzzwords and flannel.
When she reappeared ahead of the first Euro qualifier against Cyprus, further questions on the matter were stonewalled.
It took captain Rachel Corsie to come out and admit that Kerr had held her hands up in a clear-the-air meeting attended by SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell. Corsie also admitted the ‘healing process’ would take longer for some than others and it is impossible not to wonder whether a degree of residual resentment has contributed to the national team’s evident regression at a time when it should really be building its profile.
Qualifying for a first World Cup and having a nationwide audience glued to that game against Argentina — and the heartbreaking denouement of a retaken penalty kick that was initially saved — should have been a real launchpad for women’s football. It wasn’t.
Momentum died. Players seemed reluctant to talk about the World Cup at all because they might get asked about what unfolded behind closed doors. Covid-19 hasn’t helped, for sure, but the women’s game has largely disappeared back into the shadows.
In terms of media profile, there isn’t much in the way of strong analysis. Everything tends to be players and ex-players largely backing each other up. And we get that. Everyone was conscious around the time of the World Cup of starting with a clean slate, talking about role models, growing the game. All the predictable stuff.
At some point, though, it has to get serious — properly serious — if things are going to move forward.
Evans’ cry from the heart might just be the turning point required, the moment of realisation that turning a harsh spotlight on failure can bring greater long-term good than just jabbering on about how the ladies did jolly well to get to a big tournament in the first place.
Evans spoke about the need to focus on ‘professionalism’. ‘We should be getting more out of the squad, more out of each other,’ she said. ‘The coaching staff need to get more out of us.’
Sure, women’s football is different from men’s football. In some regards, though, the same rules apply.
Had Steve Clarke blown a threegoal lead in the closing minutes of a finals match against unproven opposition, held an explosive team meeting after a few drinks and then gone out of the next major championship at the qualifying stage without scoring a goal against lesser-ranked rivals, he’d be returning to Hampden to his belongings in a black bag on the front steps.
Kerr, in contrast, was put on to an advisory panel for the International Football Association Board after that ignominious exit from France 2019 and remains a media darling.
Can that last much longer after this week’s events? Time will tell. If she is permitted to carry on regardless, though, it will certainly say much about where the real levels of ambition and expectation lie.