Our inglorious bastard of a leader, Craig Fowler, goes through the football related questions you’ve sent us over the past week. Apologies for failing to come through with the second half of last week’s two-parter until now.
Minus Celtic, could a team of Scottish Premiership Scots beat a team of Scottish Premiership foreigners? – Kris Jack (@krisjack85)
I did something similar to this a few weeks ago. See here – http://terracepodcast.net/misc/2014/3/19/the-terrace-mailbag-week-2. I’ll quickly go through a couple of squads again with the Celtic players taken out:
Scottish Premiership Scots
GK Jamie MacDonald (Hearts)
RB Dave Mackay (St Johnstone)
CB Mark Reynolds (Aberdeen)
CB Steven Anderson (St Johnstone)
LB Andrew Robertson (Dundee United)
CM Keith Lasley (Motherwell)
RM Gary Mackay Steven (Dundee United)
AM Stuart Armstrong (Dundee United)
LM Iain Vigurs (Dundee United)
ST Kris Boyd (Kilmarnock)
ST Stevie May (St Johnstone)
Scottish Premiership Foreigners
GK Marian Kello (St Mirren)
RB David Raven (Inverness CT)
CB Josh Meekings (Inverness CT)
CB Gary Warren (Inverness CT)
LB Evangelos Ikonomou (Ross County)
DM Richie Foran (Inverness)
DM Wilo Flood (Aberdeen)
RM Lionel Ainsworth (Motherwell)
AM Peter Pawlett (Aberdeen)*
LM Nadir Ciftci (Dundee United)
ST Billy Mckay (Inverness CT)
*Born in England.
Not sure how much the Aberdeen fans reading this are going to like those two teams. There’s a number of Dons who could have made it – Anderson, Robson, McGinn, Rooney. I’ll go with the “the whole is greater than the sum of their parts” excuse. Yes, that should do it.
Anyway, who would win? Erm… bloody hell. I don’t know actually. That looks like a pretty good game of football right there. I think the Scots have a slightly stronger defence, particularly at full-back, but I do like the midfield in the 4-2-3-1 of the foreigners, while May and Boyd would be better than Mckay. The Scottish team might just edge it slightly, which I guess answers your question: yes, yes they could.
What’s needed to make Hibs a force within Scottish football again? – Craig McCaffery (@alkorta81)
This is a tough question. The general consensus is that Rod Petrie should loosen the purse strings and be more ambitious. The problem with this argument is that it’s much easier said than done; nothing more than hypocritical ignorance from people who have no idea how to run a football club. The same people who will readily blast other clubs (i.e. Hearts) for spending out with their means. Other teams are performing better than Hibs with smaller budgets and similar business plans. I know this won’t be an acceptable answer for Hibs fans who want someone to blame, but football will always have an element of luck to it and Hibs have gone through some bad luck when it’s come to hiring managers since Tony Mowbray left the club. Good managers make all the difference. That’s the one key point that all the writers I’ve seen in the last few weeks have failed to point out. They are trying to claim that Hibs’ approach to hiring and firing managers has been seriously flawed, with the John Collins departure being the biggest piece of evidence they can muster.
Everybody seems to forget now that Hibs were beginning their decline with Collins in charge. Forgetting the whole “secret meeting” debacle, Collins couldn’t identify talent and brought some utter dross to Easter Road – Alan O’Brien and Clayton Donaldson to name two off the top of my head. And even when he did spot something in a player he abused it to the point where the talent didn’t exist any more. Remember Lewis Stevenson’s performance in the League Cup Final? After that Collins played him in just about every single Hibs game, refused to drop him even when his form was suffering and turned the young talent into… well, Lewis Stevenson. Collins then went on to be a disaster in Belgium and hasn’t worked in management since. And let’s look at what followed: Mixu Paatelainen, John Hughes, Colin Calderwood and Pat Fenlon. With the exception of Paatelainen – who used his sacking from Hibs as a wake up call to make himself a better manager – which of those names is actually any good? And the thing is, none of these appointments were criticised at the time, a fact which extends to Terry Butcher’s hiring as well. It’s too easy to call these appointments “bad” in hindsight. Petrie and company don’t get that luxury.
That is not to say that I don’t blame Petrie, because I do. There are different ways to approach your business plan as a football club even when you don’t have a lot of money to spend and it’s been clear for a long time that Petrie has gone with the wrong approach. The fact that Hibs were outbid by Kilmarnock for Cillian Sheridan is the most damning example of how they underpay. It got me thinking about Hibs signings the last few years and the general shape of their squad. They always seem to have great depth without having anyone great starting in the team. There are scores of players that have been brought in on short-term deals, on little money, who have such a little impact that I can barely remember their name. Tony talks about a curse upon Easter Road whereby good players sign for Hibs, suddenly become crap and then leave town to be brilliant, the obvious examples being John Rankin and Ricardo Vaz Te – with Liam Craig someone who could soon be added to the list. Vaz Te was something of an enigma who just happened to mature at West Ham so I don’t know how much blame can be laid at the door of Hibs for that. Craig and Rankin, however, are the kind of borderline talents that are always going to be a gamble. Even St Johnstone fans will tell you that Craig was very poor in the opening couple of months of last season and didn’t do much of note the campaign before. He’s prone to bouts of poor play and there was always a good chance this would happen at Easter Road, particularly because he’s playing on a poor team. There are too many of these gambles. Players signed from overachieving smaller sides that are never guaranteed to replicate that form at another club.
While I don’t think they should gamble with their finances they should at least be looking to take a few more gambles with regard to player acquisitions. Rather than buying six players on a one or two year deal for £1k a week why not go out and get two or three players on a three year deal at £3k a week. Give yourself a better chance of the player coming good at the expense of some depth to the squad because, as I’ve said, depth is no use when the first teamers aren’t any good. James Collins has been a major mistake, but at least it represents a move in the right direction. And this time they need to give their manager a couple of seasons to get it right. Unless they are actually bottom of the table next season then they have to be patient. What’s their alternative? Start all over again? Roll the dice once more with a new manager and hope they get double sixes? Recent form would show them that’s not a good idea.
Given other clubs existential danger, are Celtic fans entitled to moan and complain about performances at Celtic Park? – @FMCeltic
This question needn’t be limited to Celtic. Do Hibs fans have a right to vent about the lack of funds spent on the team when their local rivals almost went out of existence because of such extravagance? Were the United support entitled to moan last year about a below-average season when Dundee were one of the worst teams in SPL history? It’s all relative, and yet, these comparisons are pointless in a sport that has no rationality.
In our minds we set out our hopes and expectations for every season. Whatever those dreams are, we’re not going to be delighted with the team’s endeavours unless they come close to fulfilling those dreams for us. Other teams may have looked at Hearts supporters bemoaning an inability to get into cup finals under Craig Levein’s stewardship and thought we were spoiled brats. And we were, but it was because we’d reached one level and sought out another in the never ending hope for football perfection. For there is no ceiling on football expectation. No fan base is ever satisfied. If they were then they’d disappear. Football is escapism. It’s where our wildest dreams can come true. If the pinnacle is achieved and the average fan realises that then there is little need in going back. My father is as rational a football fan as there is. He said that after we won the Scottish Cup in 1998 he considered packing in his season ticket and only watching with muted interest from afar. He’d waited 30+ years for a trophy and now that we’d secured one what was the point in going back? It was surely going to be the apex of his life supporting Hearts. 16 years later that season ticket is still going. When he first told me this, around a decade ago, I asked him why he kept going. There wasn’t a proper answer he could give. I’d like to think he wanted to keep the dream going. That he wasn’t satisfied with the knowledge it couldn’t get any better after 1998. There was, and remains, a tiny chance that one day will top that and he wants to experience it when/if that moment comes.
Back to Celtic: how can anyone moan about almost going unbeaten through an entire league season and marching towards a league title with relative ease? Easy! When your resources and expectations dictate that you do both before the beginning of the season. Other teams and their troubles don’t come into it. They are foreign to us. No-one knows what it feels like to support Hearts, Celtic, Hibs, whomever, unless you actually follow them. For Celtic fans this season the dream was a second consecutive appearance in the Champions League group stage and a domestic treble. They didn’t get their dream and they’re annoyed. And no-one has the right to tell them otherwise.
Is it better paying a decent wage for a back-up keeper or putting a young GK on the bench rather than on loan for experience. It goes well with the recent Steve Simonsen debate, but I was thinking more along the lines of Hibs and Sean Murdoch? – SFA Quizzes (@sfaquizzes)
This depends on a number of perceptions from your side. The most important of which is: what’s a decent wage? Because I highly doubt that Murdoch is on a decent wage. He’s been a career back-up and I reckon he’s never earned more than, say, £700 a week, if anywhere near that figure. A young player would earn anywhere from £150-£350 a week depending on age, experience, size of the club and how much potential they have. You’re definitely looking at quite a variance but when compared with the wages of other team members there’s not much of a difference.
Comparing it with the Simonsen situation is a better starting point. In all honestly, Rangers had every right to put an experienced and, by League One standards, excellent back-up in their squad. Rangers are notorious for their financial mismanagement, but while the squad is being paid far too much they are not the sole reason why money is going down the drain at Ibrox. In isolation it makes perfect sense. It’s when you add it to the rest of the mistakes Ally McCoist has made with regards to his squad building that it becomes another stick to beat him with. It’s the continuation of the criticism that he prefers to money at older players as opposed to giving the young players the chance to learn.
Then there are other scenarios when it makes absolutely no f***king sense whatsoever. The perfect example being Kilmarnock’s signing of both Craig Samson AND Antonio Reguero last summer. Both are top goalkeepers in Scotland, but you can only play one at a time and the other was going to sit on his backside for the majority of the season. Perhaps forgivable at a bigger club, like Rangers, it was inexcusable for Kille’s limited resources to be spent in such a manner. It was Kenny Shiels who signed both players, but Michael Johnston has a lot to answer for by agreeing to the deals knowing full well he was probably going to sack Shiels a month later.
What I’m trying to say is that it depends on each scenario. It also depends on how good the youngster is coming through. It would have been pretty foolish for Hearts to station a veteran behind Tepi Moilainen back in 2003/04, thereby knocking Craig Gordon down the pecking order. However, it made perfect sense five years later when they signed both Marian Kello and Janos Balogh to replace the departing Steve Banks, with a young Jamie MacDonald not quite ready yet.
Going on from the last blog, could a team of non-Premiership managers beat a team on managers only from the top flight? (peak and now) – Connor Gardiner (@connor_gardiner)
Peak:
Premiership side: (4-5-1) Wright; McNamara, Butcher, Hughes, Archibald; McCall, McInnes, N Lennon, Locke, Johnston; Adams
Non Premiership side (4-4-2): Garden; Murray, Jefferies, Duffy, Naysmith; McInally, Holt, Cameron, Hartley; Booth, McCoist
Does it even need to be debated? The lower league team! Hands down! The Premiership has only Johnston for width and doesn’t have a striker. Stuart Garden is a bit of cheat seeing as he was sacked the other week, but even without a goalkeeper I can’t see the Premiership side advancing enough to trouble whichever outfield player dons the oversized goalie top.
Now:
Swap Alex Neil for Jim McInally (sticking Hartley on the right); replace Gus McPherson with Jim Duffy and Gary Bollan with Jim Jefferies. The lower leagues would still win. There are just so many younger legs, particularly in the midfield. The biggest weakness of the Lowers would be the fattest centre back partnership in history, though it comes back to the problem from the ‘Peak’ game: how would the Premiership side create chances?
Enjoyed the blogs? Listen to the latest podcast. Among other things we discuss the Jamie Hamill v Derek Adams fiasco. Otherwise known as the best moment of the season.
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