Cross Kris

So, four days after Kris Boyd announced he wouldn’t play for Scotland again under the stewardship of George Burley, the debate about whether he was right or wrong continues to annoy the hell out of me, frankly. While I’m not 100% sure Boyd’s done the right thing here, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Burley, Gordon Smith and the rest of the stuffed shirts at the SFA are grade A, 100% morons.

Since Kris Boyd espoused his opinion that he would be better withdrawing his services from international football as it was clear George Burley doesn’t think him competent, the SFA have come out firing all cylinders, backing their selection as manager and chiding Boyd for his lack of patriotism and professionalism. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not convinced the Rangers striker has made the right choice here, but I don’t think the SFA have exactly covered themselves in glory either. In fact, given certain events during Burley’s reign, I’m getting more and more concerned about the direction of the national football team; progress we made under Walter Smith and Alex McLeish seems to be evaporating.

Kris Boyd has taken a fair amount of abuse this week, both aimed at his footballing ability and his personality. I can understand that Scotland fans will feel let down by the player, but I have found some of the points raised about Boyd’s goalscoring record witless at best. His international goalscoring record of seven goals in fifteen games has been dismissed because two of those goals came against the Faroe Islands; presumably this line of thinking doesn’t apply to James McFadden as well. He doesn’t score in competitive games? Four in nine. His goalscoring record, both at club and international level is simply not matched by another Scotsman currently playing football, but more on that later.

Burley has said he didn’t select Boyd because he’s not playing regularly for Rangers and he didn’t look enthusiastic in training during the week. I can’t comment on the latter point, but the first point is a little disingenuous. Darren Fletcher, Barry Robson, James McFadden; none of these three has ‘established themselves’ in their club’s first team this season. Fletcher has started five of Manchester United’s eleven games, while Barry Robson has started three of Celtic’s eleven (although admittedly he did miss three games due to a groin injury). Boyd meanwhile, has started six of Rangers’ eleven games, and featured as a substitute three more times.

Burley has stated that Boyd isn’t doing enough to justify his national team selection, so why call him up? Why name him among the substitutes and yet not play even when you have one substitution remaining in a home World cup qualifying game you really need to win? But Burley has previous here; in Burley’s first six internationals, Boyd has played just 28 minutes of football, excluding the Czech Republic game, when he pulled out with a hamstring injury. Clearly, Burley does not care for what Boyd brings to the table, and to a certain point, that’s fair enough.

The problem arises with some of the twaddle that has dribbled out of Hampden Park since Saturday. When Burley was asked why he played Iwelumo and the goal-shy Steven Fletcher ahead of Boyd, Burley muttered some nonsense about Boyd not being established in the Rangers team and implied he wouldn’t be picking him until he was. Clearly Boyd felt, like me, that he’s in a hopeless situation; he’s clearly being used in a squad rotation system, like Fletcher and Robson, and short of full body transplant, there’s little chance of him playing more often at club level. I believe Burley has engineered this situation to a certain extent; he doesn’t want to play Boyd, and now the striker has ensured the manager doesn’t even have to go through the charade of picking him any more.

And that’s where it should have ended; instead, Burley and Smith have continued to cast aspertions about Boyd’s personality and attitude, with the former announcing he only wants ‘committed’ players in his squad. Aside from ‘committed’ being such a woolly word, it woefully misinterprets the decision of an apparently patriotic young man who wants to play and score goals for country and who simply can’t swallow the explanation his manager has provided for not selecting him.

Today, Gordon Smith joined the circus, by mentioning in an interview that the SFA considered banning Boyd from the Scotland team for life, but decided to leave the door open to him in the future. This was an astonishing admission, bordering on lunacy; why Smith felt the urge to undermine his team’s manager by speculating there will be a time in the near future when he’s not manager is one thing, to openly contemplate exacting the harshest punishment available to the SFA on a player simply because he states he no longer wishes to work with the current manager is stuff and nonsense; has no-one pointed out to Smith and Burley that David Weir played for Scotland on Saturday? The same David Weir that declared his international retirement after a tete a tete with the then Scotland manager Berti Vogts, and who then returned under his successor, Walter Smith? Wake up, Gordon. You’re supposed to be the chief executive of an International Football Association. You used to work in the media. At least putting your foot on the clutch before you put your mouth in gear might be something worth thinking about.

In conclusion, I’m still not convinced I agree with Kris Boyd’s decision to retire from international football; he may have been petulant and hasty, but he is a 25 year old footballer, a species hardly known for their common sense. Burley (52) and Smith (53) are highly paid football administrators and should know better than to allow some of their childish, reactionary remarks about the situation to appear in the media. Mind you, Smith and Burley, again, have history in this department. Burley, famously, described one of the players he’d called up as being ‘technically limited’. Admittedly, he was trying to compliment Kirk Broadfoot, but the phrase ‘damning with faint praise’ was coined for a reason.

I wait with bated breath to see what arrant nonsense I shall read in the papers tomorrow. I didn’t set out to side with Boyd, but the unrelenting drivel coming from the SFA, Burley, Smith, those people that just hate Boyd, and the more lunatic fringe of the increasingly deluded Tartan Army (where were all these loyal, committed, determined fans four years ago when Scotland were struggling to sell out Hampden?) have swung the balance of the argument firmly in Boyd’s favour as far as I’m concerned. You may not agree, but I think he’s handled himself with far more dignity than the vitriol and hypocrisy displayed by those individuals and groups listed above.

The patrons of the pub threw their hands to the ceiling in celebration, only to clasp them to their heads in disbelief when they realised the ball had spun, incredibly, the wrong side of the post. None of us could believe it. My brother-in-law hurled abuse at the assistant referee thinking that he had flagged for offside; he hadn’t, and in fact he was making his way back to the halfway line, assuming like the rest of us that the ball would end up nestling in the net.

There are no words to describe how we felt. Well, there was one, but it has been rendered meaningless through years of mis- and over-use. I’ve long despaired at newspapers, websites and news reporters using the word ’stunning’ and its variants to describe football action when said action has come nowhere near adversely affecting my motor functions. Stunning has been applied to volleys, crosses, headers and saves with such witless profligacy that when it comes to describing the reaction of Scotland’s support to Chris Iwelumo’s miss against Norway, stunned just don’t cut it. I stood and stared, mouth agap at the TV, and I’m still not sure I believe that the ball didn’t end up in the net.

Iwelumo’s misfortune is beneficial to George Burley however, as it’ll detract some of the attention from the Scotland manager’s awful team selection and tactics. His allegedly adventurous 4-3-3 formation was in fact little different to the 4-5-1 favoured by his two predecessors, but didn’t reap the same kind of rewards. His choice of personnel didn’t match up to the formation either; asking James McFadden to play as a lone striker simply nullifies his impact, especially when you’re asking him to try and bring down long kick outs from the goalkeeper. The front ‘three’ of Morrison, Maloney and McFadden are all relatively short, and were always going to be on a hiding to nothing in the air.  The midfield were being bypassed, but even when they were brought into the game they offered little. Scott Brown is fast becoming an expensive luxury, his lack of club form transposed to international football, and a couple of inspired runs per game don’t justify his continued selection at right-midfield or bizarrely enough, in the holding role he played today. Darren Fletcher lacks the imagination to be a truly creative midfielder for Scotland, and seems happier when acting as a lieutenant rather than a captain. The best of our midfield three today, Barry Robson, was marginalised by spending most of the game on the right flank rather than his stronger left.

Charlie Nicholas, and most of the people around me in the pub, prescribed substitutions at half time; switching to 4-4-2 and introducing an second striker to support McFadden would give Scotland more potency in attack. Burley decided to stick with the same line up until the 56th minute when he introduced Steven Fletcher, and Chris Iwelumo for McFadden. The latter is a talisman for the Scotland support, and they didn’t take his withdrawal kindly, although he did seem to be suffering from some kind of injury to his hamstring or thigh. Iwelumo’s first touch, a few minutes later, was to be the horrifying miss I described in the opening passage. I say horrifying because it’s the kind of miss that fans won’t forget and that might affect the player in question’s confidence in the future. It remains to be seen if Iwelumo will bounce back from what was a really rather bad miss.

Some other Scotland fans around me however questioned the very decision to send on Iwelumo for his first cap, and Fletcher for his second when there was a proven international goalscorer sitting alongside them on the bench. Kris Boyd has seven goals from six international starts, and is the second highest goalscorer in the history of the Scottish Premier League, yet it seems to me that three years of solid press articles and features about his supposed lack of ability have ruined his credibility, to the point where George Burley will throw on two unproven strikers before him. With the absence of Kenny Miller, this seemingly means that Boyd is now fifth choice striker for his country, and quite frankly that flabbergasts me.

I think it’s too early to call for Burley’s head, but I am certainly starting to have concerns about where we’re going under his stewardship; it certainly doesn’t seem to be South Africa. We now face an uphill struggle to qualify with two games against Holland and an away fixture against Norway to come.

However, this all just appears to my symptomatic of a greater underlying malaise in Scottish football. I can’t think of another nation in the world that has upwards of four seperate governing bodies in somewhat conflicting control of the game in their country. I certainly can’t think of another nation that would call up its most ruthless striker and leave him sitting on the bench. If I had my way I’d make wholesale changes, but I don’t suspect I’ll ever get my way. Until such times we maximise our resources and play to our strengths, we’re always going to struggle for success and I suspect our traditional glorious failure might be beyond us before long.