We can’t keep blaming annual Euro failures on bad luck

SPEAKING in May, Gordon Strachan identified a new reason for Scottish football’s decline. Unlucky passers. ‘We play scared football when we come up against big teams,’ said the Scotland boss. ‘We’re a nation of what I’d call unlucky passers. You’ll watch our players say: “Oh, unlucky”. But we’re not unlucky. It will be the fourth time someone has made a poor pass.’ Those words came to mind the other night as Aberdeen crashed out of Europe. The Pittodrie team were the victims of some freakish misfortune in Maribor. Most of it created by a Bulgarian graduate from The Willie Collum School of Refereeing. Nikola Popov failed to play advantage when Adam Rooney was cynically chopped down in the area. As Niall McGinn played on to score a ‘goal’, play was pulled back for a penalty-kick, subsequently missed by Rooney. The tie perched at 1-1 from a home leg Aberdeen should have won out of sight. As soon as the penalty was missed in Slovenia, you could see where the night was heading. Popov dismissed Aberdeen substitute Jayden Stockley for two utterly innocuous fouls after failing to red card Maribor’s goalkeeper for the penalty. Even the pitch had it in for Aberdeen. A Graeme Shinnie pass-back to Joe Lewis in injury time hit a bobble and bounced over the foot of the embarrassed goalkeeper. With that, the game was up. An average Maribor team won a Europa League play-off place they barely deserved. Suddenly, Scottish football was back in an old groove. Screaming about bad luck. Newspaper journalists have written so many hard-luck tales concerning our teams in Europe it might be easier to keep the text on the F5 key to save time next year. Barely a fortnight ago, it was Hibernian. The Easter Road club reversed a 1-0 home defeat to Brondby in Denmark. Then crashed out on penalties. Hearts did no better. Had Prince Buaben scored a first-half penalty, the Tynecastle club would surely have seen off mediocre Maltese opposition. He didn’t. The result of all this is another season of abject failure by SPFL clubs in Europe. Three of our four representatives out of Continental competition before the league season kicks off. Again. Only Latvia has suffered a more catastrophic co-efficient slump in recent years. Screaming ‘unlucky’ year after year is self-defeating. Scottish football can pretend our clubs are victims of a grand conspiracy. That they persistently fail to get the breaks others get. Or we can accept the truth. That when early exits happen year after year, it can’t always be bad luck.