Former Scotland manager Craig Brown says he still feels "great regret" over his decision not to pick Ally McCoist in his squad for the 1998 World Cup."It's with great regret with hindsight that I made that decision. It rankles with me," he told BBC Scotland. "I spoke at a dinner last week and Alistair [McCoist] was there. I publicly apologised because I felt I'd done the wrong thing. "He knows it and I know it. I've got to accept it and live with it I'm afraid."

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44136835

 

About time Mr Brown was put out to pasture. Apologising for something he did 20 years ago AND he is NOT on a wind up.

It's an interview about the difficulty of picking world cup squads on the day of the world cup squads being announced.

 

With strikers of Durie, Gallacher, Donnelly Jackson and Booth, on paper his statement looks reasonable; McCoist had a far better scoring record than any of those.

 

However, delve a little deeper and you see that he only played in 3 of the qualifying games, with only 1 start (he was subbed after 75 minutes) in the first game in august 1996, and only two further sub appearances. In the entire two years leading up to the campaign he had cause to call on McCoist on only three occasions with him scoring zero goals.

 

It sounds like the deluded ramblings of a man trying to make his thoughts relevant. He's making something up 20 years after the event which doesn't align with the facts (the football managering equivalent of the UKIP voter pining for the way things used to be, based on a starry-eyed view of the past) . Pandering to a guy that doesn't deserve it and in doing so, attempting to turn his playing career into some mythical "talisman" type role (which it possibly was for the hun and in his mid Scotland career). He's over-playing something that didn't need to be over-played. If he'd left him out of Euro 96 then he'd definitely have had a point, but on this one he's conjuring a story out of nowhere. At 34, and having played his last game for der hun (albeit scoring in a cup final defeat to Hertz) he was very much a guy on the downward spiral. If Brown had any thoughts about putting him in the squad then he should have strongly considered his position, because he wouldn't have been there on merit, but nostalgia. Everything McCoist did prior and since, at Killie, backs up his decision to not have him in the squad.

 

That said, this whole thread would have fitted nicely into the crap quotes thread. I'm not one to complain about the unnecessary beginning of new threads, but I think this could be one for the more astute moderator to take a view on.

 

It sounds like the deluded ramblings of a man trying to make his thoughts relevant.

 

 

Spot on.

 

And yet our c of a chairman decides to keep on the GWT? The expenses and the rest we're paying him is could fund a couple of decent youngsters.

My Dad still maintains if Duncan Ferguson had not refused to play international football and played in that WC we'd have beaten the Brazilians in the first game (citing Zidane's headed goals in the final) and therefore made it out of the groups. After that it's a lottery...

 

Remember seeing Ferguson in one of his very first matches for Yinited.....3-2 win for us at Tannadump. He was a beanpole but utterly terrorised our central defenders that day and I remember saying he would be a huge star down south one day.

 

Not sure if we would have beaten Brazil but certainly by the late 90's he was the best Scottish striker around and it is a shame he felt compelled to take the action he did.