DollyLongstaffe

When Maddison's loan finishes - and I think it's far more likely to be January than later, although one can hope and pray - I will probably go and find a dark corner and weep. He is a reminder of how the Aberdeen sides I watched as a kid played the game - before the kind of player who was good enough to unlock defences through the middle using ball skills and intelligence started to command the kind of wages we couldn't even look at. He's turned a team that wasn't very hard to defend against - cut off the supply to Hayes and McGinn, if they do get the ball minimise their chances of getting in a decent cross and keep tight on Rooney - into a nightmare for defenders, because there's now even more threat through the middle than down the flanks. He can create from nothing and sucks defenders away from the guys they usually try to double up on. He's also a reminder, in the current era's obsession with coaching and fitness, that there's no substitute for inborn talent. You can't coach what Maddison has, and sadly the hopes that I've seen expressed that his magic will somehow have rubbed off on players already at the club by the time he goes seem wildly optimistic.

Thanks for the kind words. 1903 Redz, my point is that the game has broadened its appeal in other countries (especially England) but not here. The stigma that used to attach to the game among the middle-classes has largely evaporated. In the 60s it would have been a very rare politician who would have admitted to a passion for the game. By the 90s Tory cabinet ministers were sitting side by side in matches at Chelsea. In the 60s England suffered compared to the likes of Italy, where the game was less class-specific and where rich benefactors saw no incompatibility between being socially aspirational, culturally sophisticated and sponsoring a fitba club. The English FA now receives big chunks of government money. Virtually nobody has a real issue with that, because the country as a whole is well disposed towards the game and the national side, even though they're exasperated by under-performance. If the Scottish government tried the same thing there'd be an outcry, because (for reasons developed in my earlier post) a huge chunk of our electorate regards fitba as a national embarrassment. Who'd want to see public money indirectly subsidising Rangers, ie a collection of near gangsters? If the government sees Scottish fitba as a social problem rather than a source of national pride, that hurts our game. Like it or not, middle-class households produce a way disproportionate amount of successful sportsmen. I'm not saying we should be comfortable with that, I'm not, but it's a fact. Middle class parents are better at encouraging ambition and focus, they can afford better coaching, they send their kids to schools with better facilities. If middle class Scottish parents are much less likely than English ones to see fitba as a desirable sport for their kids, that hurts our game. My point about the SFAs greed is that it is short term. It's about keeping the cash flowing from the existing hard core of (mainly Rangers and Celtic) fans. If that means turning a blind eye to bigotry and corruption, and fostering a non-level playing field, that's what they will do. That gives the game a toxic image that means we can't broaden its appeal beyond the already committed (and even makes it harder to hold on to them). It means big business is much less likely to get involved with the game in the form of sponsorship or advertising. It means government is less likely to help. It means middle class and aspirational working class kids are much less likely to dream of playing in the Scottish leagues.

I want Strachan and McGhee gone, but it's because I despise them as people, not because I believe anyone else can do a significantly better job. Scotland is a basket case. We've stopped producing the kind of talent we need to field a decent international side, and there's no sign that's changing among the kids growing up. End result is we'll continue to chop and change managers in the hope the next guy will have a magic wand. Not enough people are seeing the connection between the corruption in our club game and the state of our national side. When I started watching fitba, it was a working-class sport in the UK and taken seriously in far fewer countries. Scotland was on a par with France as an international side, because although we had a small fraction of their population we took the game a lot more seriously. Since then the game has broadened out and gentrified. Many people don't like that, but it has implications for the amount of money coming into the game, the quality of coaching, and aspirational parents encouraging their kids to get involved. When fitba was a hard-core working class game huge swathes of England wanted nothing to do with it. So we matched them in producing fitba talent. Things have changed. Who wouldn't want their kid to be a multi-millionaire superstar? With that broadening of the game's appeal the English, whatever their shorcomings, have produced far better players than we have over the past 20+ years. In Scotland the broadening of the game's appeal beyond its original fanbase hasn't happened to anything like the same extent. Why? Well, our club fitba is dominated by two clubs, both built on sectarian bigotry. At least one of those clubs has a recent history of being mired in corruption, and the behaviour of its fans in Manchester and elsewhere is rightly seen as a national disgrace. The reaction of the authorities, football and otherwise, to anything challenging the power of those clubs, is to bend the knee. The fitba authorities think only of the short term impact on income flow, and the establishment fear violent unrest or turning a section of the electorate into single issue fanatics gunning for any politician perceived as a threat to their clubs. The evidence is everywhere: the refusal to countenance strict liability, or to enforce laws on sectarian singing, the Houdini trick of pretending that Rangers is a continuing club, the series of bizarre court and enquiry decisions confounding the expectations of informed lawyers, the refusal of the authorities to stand up for taxpayers against tax cheats, the ostracism and defenestration of journalists refusing to toe the pro-Rangers line. And the utterances of the authorities that make it clear that not only do we need Rangers (and Celtic) to survive to be successful, we need them to successful to be successful. The message to fans of other clubs: for the game to prosper we need clubs like the one you support to normally fail. The end result that the game has failed to broaden its appeal to those not already emotionally invested. The sons of ordinary working men who got a better education and ended up in middle class jobs often retain their childhood allegiances, but many decent Scots either give fitba a wide berth or bypass the Scottish game and focuss on the EPL, And when you see the sectarianism, the corruption, the willingness to bend the rules, the lack of sporting integrity, who can blame them? Now I know some posters will say, if the middle classes don't like the game, fine by me. We want the game to keep its soul, not sell out the the prawn sandwiches mob. But that comes at a price. Nowdays any footballing country that has a big section of the comfortably off, the influential and the opinion formers turning its back on the game is fighting with its hands tied behind its back. if aspirational parents don't want their kids playing football, we'll produce fewer good players. People have been contrasting the success of our Olympians with our football team, but the harsh fact is that a disproportionate amount of our Olympians, and of successful sportsment generally, come from the sort of families who are turned right off by the negatives attaching to our "national game". I don't think Scotland will start punching its weight in international football again until a bigger and more representative proportion of country is more wholeheartedly invested in the team; and I don't think that will happen until our club game starts to at least gain respect from the sort of people who haven't been steeped in it since childhood. That would require a massive injection of decency and fairness into the domestic game. It would require an upgrading of our football media, too often partisan, lickspittle and frightened of any show of integrity that might put their cushy gig at risk. It would need us to get rid of the perception that our game is run by spivs and chancers who'll bend any rule for the sake of a fiver and operate in the conviction that there is virtually no risk of them being held to proper account. In short, it needs Scottish football to be something that decent, aspirational families would be prouder for their kids to be part of. In other words, not gonna happen.

And another refugee from AbMad.