HE IS FAMOUS FOR HIS SARCASTIC PUT-DOWNS BUT UNDERNEATH THE ACID WIT IS A PROUD SCOT DESPERATE TO GET ONE OVER ON THE ENGLISH... AND HIS ARMY OF CRITICS AT HOME Whose line is it Enemy
GORDON STRACHAN can be chippier than a chip shop, dottier than polka dots and pricklier than the flower of Scotland itself.
Like Roy Keane’s thousandyard glare, Joe Kinnear’s alphabet from A to F, or Harry Redknapp’s tombola of excuses, to be on the receiving end of the Scotland manager’s quick wit is one of football’s great rites of passage.
Can we have a quick word, Gordon? “Velocity.”
Do you think you are the right man for the job, Gordon? “No – I think they should have got George Graham instead because I’m useless.”
So, Gordon, any special plans for Europe this year? “Aye, me and the wife quite fancy Spain in August.”
Gordon, you must be delighted with that result? “You’re spot-on. You can read me like a book.”
Ask Strachan a banal question and he will respond in kind but, beneath the acerbic wit, there sometimes lurks arrogance to the point of downright rudeness.
One of his last acts as the unlamented manager of Middlesbrough six years ago, following a home defeat by Leeds United, was to start chomping on an energy bar during a postmatch TV interview. Nice diet, shame about the manners.
And before last month’s damaging draw with Lithuania, his public relations radar switched from shortwave to shorttempered when BBC’s Sportscene host Jonathan Sutherland tried to act as a conduit for questions from the Tartan Army.
“Oh, no, no, no, no – I’m not going to sit here and answer questions from members of the public,” snapped Strachan. “You can think of your own ones.
“Do you think it’s a hotline here? For goodness sake!”
Strachan’s four-year reign in charge of Scotland could end this weekend, if they lose against England in tomorrow night’s World Cup qualifier at Wembley. But, if the end is nigh, he is taking the threat with a pinch of saltire.
“People say, am I worried about getting the sack? Am I b ****** s – I am 59-years-old, I will go and play golf. I can do whatever I want.”
Acerbic one-liners, Caledonian defiance and disdain for banality aside, Strachan has sustained a lifetime as one of football’s most charismatic figures.
As a player, he won the title both sides of the border with Aberdeen and Leeds, and as a manager guided Celtic to a hat-trick of Premier League triumphs in an era when it was a two-horse race with Rangers, not the current procession.
He has had bigger mountains to climb than a misfiring England at Wembley – like trying to hurdle the advertising boards after scoring against West Germany at the 1986 World Cup and only managing to perch one leg on the summit.
Strachan is also revered at all the clubs where he played and never short of a good yarn.
He reckons the drinking culture at Manchester United was once so acute that players on a training camp in Bermuda were “running into palm trees” and the session had to be cancelled.
And at Celtic, so the story goes, Strachan was summoned by the emergency services, when one of his players barricaded himself inside his house, with furniture pushed up against the door.
The siege ended within minutes of him turning up at the distressed player’s address.
Strachan may need all his diplomatic charm at Wembley, where he goes head-to-head with Gareth Southgate – the man he succeeded as boss at Middlesbrough in 2009.
England’s interim manager had only just finished discussing the virtues of Boro’s 2-0 home win against Derby, when he received a late-night summons to the boardroom to learn his fate.
Do not rule out the possibility that Strachan – who has also bossed Coventry and Southampton – could turn over Southgate one more time.
If Britain can vote for Brexit and the United States can vote to leave America, stranger things have happened in 2016.