Maxwell is already looking lost at sea
HERE we go again. The best part of two months away from Scotland’s next Euro 2020 double-header against Cyprus and Belgium and Kieran Tierney, biting the bullet for his club at the moment, is already discussing the possibility of not being involved.
What’s the betting there will be others taking note and pencilling in that week-and-a-half in June as a designated period for — to resurrect the phrase used in relation with Steven Fletcher during the last shambles against Kazakhstan and San Marino — ‘managing their injuries’?
The pattern is set. Players don’t fancy certain games and the management tie themselves up in knots by feeding all sorts of cock-and-bull stories to the public while silence reigns over why the likes of Robert Snodgrass, Tom Cairney and Matt Ritchie — fit and able enough to play every week in the English Premier League — remain nowhere to be seen.
One thing is sure as things stand. Paying punters will also be nowhere to be seen by the time Cyprus pitch up in town and that ought to focus the mind of SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell ahead of his board’s planned get-together on Thursday.
It is now crunch time for this guy. No question about it. These qualifiers against Cyprus and Belgium look every bit as ominous for the SFA as an asteroid hurtling towards earth and Maxwell needs to show he is capable of more than just shutting his eyes and assuming it won’t wipe him out with the particular breed of dinosaurs he rubs shoulders with.
We are more than three weeks on from that 3-0 drubbing in Kazakhstan, probably the worst result in Scotland’s history. McLeish has had the League Managers’ Association dismissing rumours about his future and just making a bad situation even worse. The Tartan Army are in full revolt.
Yet, nothing comes from the SFA. Nothing ever does these days.
President Alan McRae clearly isn’t trusted to speak. Vice-president Rod Petrie doesn’t want to. Their communications chief is offski after today’s cup semi-final.
As for Maxwell, he is beginning to look lost at sea, incapable of steering this sorry excuse for a national organisation out of its debilitating, demoralising torpor.
The 43-year-old is almost a year on from being appointed against a backdrop of allegations that his rise from board member to boss man was little more than a jobs-for-theboys carve-up.
He offered little in the way of concrete promises on the day of his coronation and has delivered even less since.
Yes, Hampden was saved and we were spared the ignominy of renting out a rugby ground thanks to bail-outs from a couple of businessmen, but what’s happened to the plan to rebuild the stadium along the lines of Stuttgart’s Mercedes-Benz Arena?
Where are we on Video Assistant Referees more than four months on from Maxwell promising to join forces with fellow SFA director Neil Doncaster to work out a plan?
Maxwell was hailed as some kind of visionary for getting people in a room in Perth to talk about evaporating faith in the SFA’s refereeing system, but actually taking a critical look at the inner workings of the SFA’s refereeing system seems off limits.
In any case, players being assaulted and hit by missiles has diverted the attention. Last we heard, Maxwell and Doncaster had turned their attentions to designing an action plan to tackle such disorder — only to have it rubbished by the Scottish Government.
It is not good. Maxwell also has the impending independent review of sexual abuse in Scottish football ticking away in the background and has shown little so far to suggest he is going to cope with its findings.
At the time of a quite scathing interim report, you may remember, he found himself having to contact
Reporting Scotland to say he’d got his answers wrong on camera when stating the SFA had not failed children despite all evidence to the contrary.
Maxwell badly needs to prove he can get a grip on things and effect change before he becomes written off as just another careerist blazer with little on his record other than overseeing Partick Thistle’s relegation from the top flight.
He is, of course, still painted in some quarters as a proper football man trying his best in a stifling, anachronistic environment, but he knew the politics inside out before he went for the chief executive’s job. He spent a year on the SPFL board from July 2016 before jumping across to the SFA in 2017, after all, and is not innocent.
Calling a halt to McLeish’s reign would only be the start for him, mind you. It is certainly unthinkable that another week can pass without a word being uttered on the national manager’s situation.
The Scotland set-up, once the beacon of our game, looks more shabby and unloved with each passing fixture. Punters have switched off. Players have too. There is still no major sponsor.
It comes as no surprise to hear Tierney is planning to use his summer to rest a long-standing problem. Likewise, it is depressing, but nothing new, to watch Manchester United’s Scott McTominay impress at the top level and find himself unable to get into the Scotland team. We’ve already had it with Ryan Fraser at Bournemouth and, to a degree, James Forrest at Celtic.
Yes, the SFA are so skint that committing the cash to paying off McLeish might well be problematic, but, equally, can they afford to see Hampden Park lying three-quarters empty during a Saturday home game in summer that should be a licence to print money?
That has the potential to be a horrible night of self-loathing. If we play the way we did in Israel or Kazakhstan, Belgium could take 10 off us the following midweek.
The day after that, Petrie, the embodiment of everything wrong with an SFA that has not modernised itself anywhere near as much as it might have you believe, is expected to take over unchallenged from McRae as president.
It is a perfect storm. A disaster movie in the making. What’s more, everyone can see it coming and Maxwell is running out of time to change the asteroid’s trajectory.
Even if he can’t or won’t, he will still survive the ensuing fireball, no doubt. It’s just that it would be hard, in that event, to see him as more than just another member of the self-preservation society, another of those creatures who find a way to scurry clear of blast zone after blast zone unharmed.
Like cockroaches. Like Petrie. And so many of those who have disappointed us before.