The Trouble with Scotland is That It’s Full of Scots

Published on in New
Scotland national team

Yes, it’s an inflammatory title, but I stole it from a movie so it’s probably fine.

The international break is all about pretence. For English people who don’t like football, it’s a chance to impress your mates who do by pretending you like Harry Kane and for English people who do like football, it’s a time when you’re forced to pretend you like Harry Kane.

The whole thing is untrustworthy by its very nature, as are the people who look forward to it, and I have as much time for either as I do for people who hang their toilet roll with the loose end next to the wall.

Maybe I feel this way because I see the international break as a rude disruption to the recently returned flow of club football that I’ve desperately pined for over the last three months. Maybe it’s because I’m cross that all the games during the international break are played in the evening, forcing me to actually do something with my weekend during the day.

Maybe it’s because the international break acts as a constant reminder that Haris Seferović is still out there nicking a living somewhere. Whilst all of these things are indeed true, my main issue with the international break is that it means that at some point I know I’ll have to sit through at least 90 minutes of Scotland attempting to play association football.

Thankfully though, the international break is now two weeks in the past. That’s a long time in football. In that time, Manchester United have gone from being quite good, to not good, to fairly shambolic, to not entirely horrific… and they’re still only one inevitable Mason Greenwood brace against Arsenal away from being quite good again.

However, two weeks is apparently not enough time to stop the deficiencies of the Scottish national team continuing to be in the news. The other day, Jamie Redknapp bravely stuck his neck out to opine that the reason Andy Robertson plays better for Liverpool than he does for Scotland is because Liverpool have better players than Scotland.

It’s an absolutely scorching take and certainly not one my 85-year-old granny could have made. However, it did force me to once again painfully mull over the shortcomings of the Scottish national team and why they are so apparent.
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Supporting Scotland is an arduous task that never fails to fill you with contempt, but this is mostly fine because Scottish people are pretty good at contempt. They hate voice recognition technology, they hate children singing Cher Lloyd, they probably hate being generalized and they’ve got such an issue with anything remotely right wing that they’ve decided their two best footballers should play left back, which is a level of spite other liberal countries around the world can only aspire to.

You could even argue that much of Scotland’s love of football stems from the fact that going to games serves as an excuse for fans to be horrible to each other. Then again, you could probably make that exact same case for football fans from anywhere, except the ones who support Southampton because they are far too nice and probably need to grow up a bit.

The Old Firm is a bit of a special case though. In it, Scotland boasts possibly the fiercest rivalry in club football. I’m not going to try to convince you if you think otherwise, just know that literally all the hardest blokes Glasgow has to offer are on my side of the argument, and they’ll hoof you if you say I’m wrong.

Gary Lineker once wrote about matches between Celtic and Rangers that “there is nothing to compare with them in terms of their intensity and ferocity, not to mention the sheer noise”, but the jury is still out as to whether or not he was actually talking about Walkers Spicy Siracha.

It is a big deal though: both Ibrox and Celtic Park are filled to capacity whenever the two teams meet. That’s a minimum of 50,000 fans, which is simply too many people to all be looking for a fight at the same time. Fans go because they are fans and want to watch football, as it transpires that quite a lot of people in Scotland care about the sport.

So, since there is clearly such a vested interest in football at a domestic level, why are Scotland so deficient internationally? Aside from England, whom I have been forced to accept will always be better than us, they should be the best home nation.

Yet at the most recent European Championships in 2016, not only were all of the other home nations present, they also all went past the group stages. The last major international tournament Scotland took part in was the 1998 World Cup – a tournament so long ago it’s now considered cool to wear football shirts from it.

Welsh fans, who probably care more about sheep rugby, are rewarded for their lack of interest with Gareth Bale and a European semi-final. So why is it that Scotland fans are forced to work out how to watch a Thursday 4pm kick off in Central Asia, and then deal with their team being 2-0 down before ten-past?

The Old Firm, and the Scottish Premiership along with it, stand as definitive proof of Scotland’s passion for football. I am by no means saying this passion doesn’t exist in Wales, but it is certainly much more diluted.

And maybe that is actually Scotland’s problem. Whilst the standard of club football in Scotland is much higher to that of the domestic leagues in Wales, it unfortunately is not as competitive as those in England.

Only one member of the current Welsh squad came through the youth system of a Welsh team that played outside of the English system, and he is rather ironically the only one of that squad who plays his club football in Scotland. Better players tend to be produced in better league systems, and virtually all of the Scottish players (who actually come from Scotland) came through the Scottish system.

A very good friend of mine once summed up the Scottish Premiership as “Mate, it’s a 30-year-old Graham Dorrans panenka-ing a penalty on his Rangers debut whilst wearing the number 10 on his back.”

I do believe it amounts to much more than that and think it’s important to relay that the friend’s opinion was formed before I took them to go see a very fun Ayr United side lose 1-0 at home to Inverness Caledonian Thistle. However, let’s not forget that the Graham Dorrans incident did actually happen and, whilst also being very funny, it probably gives a pretty good indication that the English system is at the very least quite a lot better than the Scottish one.

As it always seems to do in football nowadays, this argument comes down to money. Since the investment in the Scottish Premiership is vastly unproportionate to the level of interest it garners across Scotland, in terms of talent production, the league will never be able to properly compete with the international success that is the Premier League.

Are there other factors as to why Scotland regularly get disembowelled by the likes of Artem Dzyuba? Absolutely, but this seems to be the most prevalent to me. It’s sad and it’s depressing and now I’m cross again because I’ve remembered about Artem Dzyuba. So, I’m going to stop writing now and watch Kevin de Bruyne ruthlessly smash in Belgium’s fourth goal against us for some catharsis.

by Xavier Bird

Twitter: @XaviBird

Once Upon a Time in… Burnley: Why Sean Dyche is Football’s Answer to Quentin Tarantino

Published on in Opinion/Premier League
Sean Dyche Burnley

On Friday, I went to watch “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” with my girlfriend at the cinema. If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t care for spoilers, then I can promise that this article will reveal nothing of importance to the film… but I can also promise that that is exactly what a writer would say to someone he desperately wanted to continue reading his work.

So, it’s up to you to see how dangerous you’re feeling, but I should remind you that this is an article about Sean Dyche and not a film review so, unless your idea of ‘too dangerous’ is a man who probably writes weekly letters to his local pharmacy inquiring why they haven’t invented a baked bean flavoured lozenge yet, I’d advise you to carry on reading.

If you’re still with me, both my girlfriend (yes, I’ve mentioned that twice now) and I thought the film was overly long, extremely self-indulgent, at times a little boring, and at others a bit weird. It’s essentially a love letter to old Hollywood that Tarantino has dictated and then left on a 1960s tape recorder for Margot Robbie to transcribe, except she’s only allowed to hold a pen with her feet. I didn’t think it was great. There – that’s all I’m giving away.

The following day, I found myself watching the Premier League’s late kick-off: Burnley vs Liverpool. It finished 3-0 to a very clinical away side, who became the first ever Liverpool team to win 13 consecutive league games in the club’s long, illustrious history, and who will almost certainly be challenging for this season’s league title when May comes around, inevitably churning out results just like that one for the next eight and a half months.

My attention afterwards should have naturally gravitated towards Jürgen Klopp and his record-breaking team, the quality of their finishing and the sturdiness of their defence. Most of all, in my post- “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” mindset, I should have been focusing on the Tarantino-like personality instilled within this great team by possibly the most charismatic manager currently working in world football.

Klopp, whose hipster appearance, sense of self-confidence, fairly manic demeanour and “heavy metal” approach to life are perfectly encapsulated by his team, is basically crying out to be directly compared with Tarantino, whose films emulate many of the same qualities within him.

Yet, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is not the work of a man who could go to Turf Moor on a Saturday evening and grind out a comfortable 3-0 win and, as the final whistle blew, I instead was drawn towards the man standing in the opposite dugout to Klopp.

Sean Dyche is a six-foot-tall, voluntarily bald, former centre-back from Kettering whose voice sounds like he’s swallowed a big bag of rocks that he may or may not end up throwing at you depending on how the conversation goes. He may never have been seen as a visionary in his field as Tarantino has (I’m not even kidding, if you google the phrase “Sean Dyche visionary” it will only show results that are “Missing: visionary”).

He may have entirely contrasting interests, come from a completely different background and look nothing like Tarantino, but the two bizarrely have things in common. You don’t need to have watched “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to know that Tarantino is obsessed with old Hollywood (the title does give it away a bit though). In the same way, Dyche loves a good, old-fashioned, defensively minded 4-4-2.

The 4-4-2 may have been made cool again by Leicester City’s still fairly recent antics, but that isn’t Dyche’s 4-4-2. The old-school and proper way: two banks of four, two strikers over six foot who are hardly ever more than ten metres apart, a bit of aggression, very little flair and absolutely no nonsense.

Dyche’s is a tried and tested formula, much like the Spaghetti-Westerns of the 1960s that Tarantino’s film harkens to, and it works: two years ago it was really just as simple as “None of this fancy European stuff. Let’s knock it long to Sam Vokes, get out of the single market and into the Europa League.”

However, on Saturday Burnley were beaten 3-0. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” also highlights the fallibility of the outdated, formulaic approach, pitting Leonardo DiCaprio’s old world against Margot Robbie’s new one, but the film also glorifies it in a way that makes the new seem completely superfluous without the old – OK, THAT’S all I’m giving away.

Basically, what I got out of the film was that Quentin Tarantino fundamentally believes that teams like Burnley and managers like Sean Dyche are entirely necessary to the Premier League. Tarantino loves the old-fashioned way and Dyche’s style has been around for donkey’s years. Gruff, unapologetic and most of all uncomplicated, it may not be the effervescent approach Tarantino himself would opt for, but it’s the approach of someone who absolutely does not care what anyone else thinks, which I think is about as Tarantino as it gets.

Both Sean Dyche and Quentin Tarantino are unashamedly themselves, and they’re not going to change. Tarantino abides in a world that is completely driven by what people’s faces are doing and yet decides to obsess over their feet; Dyche’s world is one which is absolutely focussed on people’s ability with their feet, but he ruddy loves it when the big lad gets up and uses his head.

They’re going against the grain. You can’t stop them. It’s so commendable.

Today in English football, everybody is trying to be a different version of either Liverpool or Manchester City. You can’t tell me otherwise: at the weekend I saw Rochdale score a stunning Guardiola-esque 16-pass goal against Southend. Sean Dyche is not about that, and neither is Tarantino.

In a world full of shoddy remakes and sequels, it’s nice to know that, despite it being a bit boring at times, there are at least two men who are still doing their own thing.

by Xavier Bird

Twitter: @XaviBird

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