Where now for Scotland? – The Aftermath

Scotland’s failure to qualify for Euro 2016 has been met with a typical “get rid of them all” response from some of the more reactionary elements of our support. While that is clearly over the top, the squad certainly needs freshening up ahead of the World Cup campaign. There will be a great deal of discussion about Gordon Strachan’s future in the coming weeks, but whoever is in charge for the next campaign will be tasked with managing a transition into a new generation of players.

The approach to squad selection has to be coherent, logical and brutally unsentimental. Before calling up a player we should ask two questions: 1) Is he likely to play? 2) Will his selection benefit us in the long-term? A bit like the X-Factor, if a player gets two ‘noes’ then he should be dumped out and forced to return to stacking shelves in Aldi. There is no point in having 29 year old English Championship jobbers in the squad purely to sit on the bench all the time. Nobody gains anything from that. Pick your core of 16-18 players for each game and then augment that with young, hungry players who might offer something in the future. They’ll gain experience, and their energy and positivity will rub off on the senior players.

As long as this strategy is communicated to the players we shouldn’t have any issues. Put the older fringe players on a reserve list and keep them in the loop. If a senior guy gets injured then parachute a back-up into the squad to play. If anyone has a problem with that then they’re probably not worth the effort anyway. In terms of who the players obtaining “experience”, typically it will be guys from the U21s or who have just graduated from the U21s, but it could also be late bloomers who have been performing well or Scottish players who are playing abroad and are slightly off the manager’s radar. If the U21s have a game, then that should take precedence over sitting on the bench for the seniors and we should pick players from the latter categories.

The problem with such a strategy is that it isn’t necessarily in a manager’s personal interests to adopt it. If Gordon Strachan remains in charge for the next campaign then he will be under tremendous pressure to reach the play-offs in what is a reasonably tough group. He has less incentive to plan for the future when he knows that one wrong step in the present might lead to that future not being his.

That is where the SFA’s Performance Director should come in. At the moment, his role seems to exclusively cover the youth teams, but that shouldn’t be the case. He should also act as a sort of “director of football” for the senior squad, ensuring a consistent strategy is applied from manager to manager. The strategy should outlined in the manager’s contract and the Performance Director should work with him to ensure that it is implemented. There will probably be a media backlash at the prospect of a manager losing some autonomy, but the days of the manager being an all-powerful dictator are a thing of the past, much like Keith Jackson and Hugh Keevins themselves.

My opinion is that Gordon Strachan should be given the opportunity to stay on for the next campaign as long as he commits to this sort of idea. Chopping and changing the manager after every failure is counterproductive, and we weren’t that bad during these qualifiers. He has already shown some willingness to look to the future, with the likes of Ryan Gauld, Callum McGregor, Lewis McLeod and Callum Paterson having been called up during this campaign purely to gain experience, but these call-ups dried up at the business end of the campaign.

If Strachan isn’t willing to work under those conditions, then get rid of him and bring someone else in. My preference would be to look at a guy who has absolutely no knowledge of Scottish football and who therefore brings no preconceptions with him. People bring up Berti Vogts when we talk about appointing a foreign manager but nobody mentions Craig Levein when we talk about getting another Scot to do it. I believe the Scotland job would be reasonably appealing to foreign managers; it’s not the worst place to live and they have the chance to become a hero in a very short period of time. Someone with a track record of international success would be ideal; could we tempt Lars Lagerback away from Iceland, for example?

There is also a question about how to select the Performance Director. My biggest criticism of such a role is that the measures of success are so abstract. If the national team improves, is it because of the manager, the overall strategy, the clubs, or just blind luck? Sometimes it’s really clear; in the case of Wales, it seems to be the last option, while for the likes of Iceland it is a combination of the first two. The current incumbent Brian McClair has certainly learned from the best, having spent the best part of 20 years working with Alex Ferguson as a player and a coach. I don’t know much about his ideas but my instinct is that he deserves a chance.

Leaving that aside, it will be interesting to see how the squad shapes up going forward. We need to move away from picking players for the sake of it, and we also need to put less emphasis on exactly what level a player is playing at and more on what they can offer to our squad. The Scottish Premiership as a whole might be of a lower quality than when it was at its financially doped best 15 years ago but that doesn’t mean there aren’t individuals within it who can offer something.

The 2018 World Cup will mark 20 years since Scotland qualified for anything, and that represents a failure. However, that doesn’t mean everything is entirely negative. The current U21 squad is, in my opinion, one of the strongest we have had in a long time. We are developing technically gifted footballers and they are almost all getting chances to develop at a competitive level of football, mainly in Scotland but also in England and, in one case, Portugal. These guys quite possibly represent the future of our national team and it’s important that they are transitioned towards the first team in a sensible manner. Scotland are still able to compete at the top level going forward but to do so we need to adopt the best system to allow us to do so.

Written by Craig Anderson (@craig_killie)

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