OCCASIONALLY, something catches your eye as you scan the emails and wire stories that drop on your lap hourly, daily. Yesterday, the phrase ‘Scotland will rocket’ got me reading more.
It was the opening line of an offering from a respected freelance contributor, but one which irked me slightly. This was a full-blown ‘doosra’ presented as a bit of spin.
Scotland’s perfect start to their World Cup qualifying campaign – that 5-1 victory over those Mediterranean giants Malta – will, as any victory does, promote the Scots up the FIFA rankings, a contrived points scoring system that, sceptically, I have always thought as no more than a vehicle to carry branding and sponsorship, currently that of a certain fizzy drink manufacturer with a global reach. Or to make it easy, Coca-Cola.
I mean, is Belgium’s lofty perch (they are second, behind Argentina), based on all the finals and semi-finals they’ve made it to, or, on good attendance and a decent string of results?
Scotland had dropped to No.51 in the world after ‘friendly’ losses to Italy and France. In other words, even when you are playing with half a team, dealing with injuries and, trying out a few youngsters for future reference in a meaningless match, you still get punished for turning up.
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Anyway, that is in the past. Because by the time FIFA offer up their next set of points, Gordon Strachan’s men will have ‘rocketed’ up to 44th, ahead of Australia, Denmark and South Korea. Heady stuff.
But here is where the old phrase ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’ rings true. At 44 in the world, we are almost exactly where we were when we last qualified for a major finals tournament, when Craig Brown steered our course to the 1998 World Cup in France, ranked 41st on the planet. But more on that later.
In 20/20 hindsight, and in terms of rankings, under Berti Vogts, Alex McLeish, Walter Smith, George Burley, Craig Levein and now wee Gordy, we have gone absolutely nowhere, slowly, a masterful display of treading water. Still, it’s better than our qualification portfolio where we’ve sunk without trace.
Yes, we’ve flirted with moderate success, play-offs and the likes, and diced with disaster, particularly before Strachan took over when we found ourselves behind nations that either sounded like they’d come from a Marx Brothers movie, or, were listed as an atoll in the Pacific where a nuclear bomb test had once taken place.
Scotland were in a bad way, and a dire place in ranking terms, when Strachan inherited the fall-out from Levein’s calamitous reign. And, to be fair, it is moderately better today.
But, let’s not fall into the trap of believing things are on the up and up. At face value they are. But that is only because a few months ago we were on the down and down.
We have used rankings as a crutch; in one instance we say look, we can’t qualify because our ranking pits us against better teams in qualifying. In the next breath, we are trying to say we’re doing well because we’ve overtaken Cape Verde Islands.
Similarly as a nation, us Scots have never quite got our heads around rankings, and as promised, I refer back to 1998.
BBC Scotland’s excellent ‘Scotland’s Game’ fell headlong into the trap of believing the hype while blatantly ignoring the evidence (i.e. the rankings) around our France 98 campaign.
For the record, Brazil were the No.1 team in the world, Norway seventh and Morocco, referred to as ‘outsiders’ during the show, in at a remarkable No.13 pop pickers, just the 28 places above wee Broonie’s gallant lads.
Which is again why I don’t do rankings and keep it simple. Did you qualify? Then you failed – and you are still failing …
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