MAKE OUR OWN EURO FORTUNES
Dodgy refs, bad luck and tough trips? Maybe, it is time to ...
ANIMAL slaughter might have been the answer. It worked pretty well for Shakhter Karagandy until UEFA got ever so uppity ahead of a Champions League qualifier at Celtic Park and put an end to the pageantry of exterminating livestock pre-match.
It hardly helps that those rugby bigmouths have let slip that they got ready for their last World Cup by chopping up bunny rabbits in secret. The Tofu Taliban are already forming a lynch mob and we have enough of those in football as it is, thank you very much.
Scratch that number for Malcolm Allan, the butcher, off the list for the phone interviews, then. Tell the family just to carry on with squeezing four links, four Lorne and some black pudding into a polystyrene carton and punting it off as a ‘Breakfast Pack’ for the time being.
There’s a bloke in Benin by the name of Marabout Degla, he of the good juju, who was advertising his services in the paper a while back. For the price of a year’s subscription to a key broadcast partner, he can perform the Troupkeka Milika, which, he swears, will turn any footballer into the ‘best player in the team or the world’.
Bobby Williamson can surely get his contact details.
Mind you, Troupkeka Milika — a magic ritual, rather than the name of the next bunch of Eastern European no-marks to knock a Scottish club out of Europe — involves nine days without the slightest whiff of any hurly-burly on the chaise longue, if you know what I mean.
Next thing you know, he’ll be telling our players to stay out of the juicer as well. Best tell Bobby not to bother tracking him down.
Gosh, it is tough thinking outside the box as the search for Scottish football’s new performance director, shaman and reinventor of the wheel goes on.
We need to take a different approach, for sure. That fellow Brian McClair used to traipse round the country hammering on about academies and facilities.
No wonder the clubs wouldn’t listen. If we listen to the clubs, it seems this has little to do with being illprepared and more to do with sheer ill fortune.
‘I think we were a little bit unlucky,’ stated the Hearts captain Alim Ozturk after his side missed a penalty and shipped two goals at home to a pub team from Malta.
‘Any luck went against us,’ pointed out Neil Lennon after Hibs — having competed well, it must be said — lost to Brondby on penaltykicks.
Just a shame goalkeeper Otso Virtanen, who, according to reports, has since been eaten by big Conrad Logan in a bid to win his way back into favour, tripped over the fairies in the penalty area and gifted a goal in the first leg.
Bad refereeing merited a mention, too, even if ‘acts of violence’ towards Juan Martinez Munuera remain unproven. Yes, stick bad refereeing down beside bad luck as the reasons we are now down among the dead men of European football to such a degree that voodoo might not even be enough to bring us back.
Aberdeen, briefly reinvigorated after flatlining in Luxembourg, appear to be considering acts of violence against one particular official too.
The misjudgments of Mr Nikola Popov have formed the core of that post-mortem instead of considering other reasons why 180 minutes of superiority ended in defeat to Maribor.
Oh, Maribor. Pretty town, splendid casino, but a damned land, a footballing Bermuda Triangle, within which Scottish clubs are forever destined to disappear from UEFA competition at the hands of a welcoming but wholly inconsequential club.
The devilish hand of Dame Fortune to blame, no doubt, authoress of all those glorious failures our childhoods were shaped by.
What if the ball had hit off Billy Bremner in 1974 and gone the other side of Brazil’s post?
Johnny Rep’s shot from 35 yards in 1978? Rotten luck. Just like all those goals from Peru and Iran, Alan Hansen and Willie Miller bumping into each other and Stevie Nicol missing an open goal against Uruguay.
The same hard-luck stories again and again.
It is just as well McClair called it a day, really. Our current national manager, Gordon Strachan, was too close to him, developing dangerous ideas.
‘We’ll play four or five passes, but we’re not sure if they’re going to get there,’ Strachan said earlier this year. ‘We just flick it away, hope for the best and then go: “Oh, unlucky”.
‘We are not unlucky. It will be the fourth time someone’s made a poor pass.’
Mercifully, he was back onmessage in his last public outing.
‘We cannot determine that, in Germany, there’s a foul on Charlie Mulgrew for their winner when we could be winning the game,’ he stated, reflecting on his team’s inability to reach Euro 2016 after failing to get a shot on target in Georgia.
‘I can’t determine that Germany hit a shot from 30 yards at Hampden, it hits someone on the back of the heel and trickles in. The footballing gods said: “Nah, you’ve got to suffer for a while”.’
Such comforting words. Suffering suits us, as does putting our failings down to bad spirits, dodgy refs and the negative energy of the cosmos.
It has gone on so long now that summoning the goat and the onyx-handled dagger almost seems a more acceptable course of action than the painful process of taking a truly serious look within.