BACK in the good old days, before colour or smiling was invented, Scotland provided footballing innovators in abundance. Like John Logie Baird with the telly or Alexander Graham Bell with the phone, there were plenty of pioneers on the pitch. Queen’s Park developed the passing game while that considered, cultured crowd of ‘Scotch Professors’ ventured south to spread the gospel and teach the uneducated lot over the border how to kick a ball about with purposeful pizzazz and panache. We basically gave this game to the world. And now that world points, mocks and throws turnips at us like were are Frankenstein emerging in front of a horrified public for the first time. In the barren, backward footballing wilderness that the Scottish game appears to inhabit these days, it seems the only thing we have mastered now is the ability to trap the ba’ further than most teams can kick it.
In this respect, being entrusted to lead the implementation of the SFA’s Performance Strategy is akin to carrying the burden that used be plonked on the shoulders of Atlas. Malky Mackay, the new man at this particular helm, won’t mind that. Given the controversy that has hung around him like a thick smog following those well-documented text messages, he’s used to lumping around cumbersome weights.
So, how do you solve a problem like Scottish football? With great difficulty. Grassroots here, pathways there, academies everywhere? There may be a potential Lionel Messi kicking about on the Toryglen pitches but he ain’t been unearthed yet. The weather, the diet, the couch potato culture, the distractions, the positioning of sport in the school curriculum, facilities, expense, the lack of work ethic in an X-Factor generation that wants instant celebrity; there are plenty of questions but not many answers. Mackay’s job is to come up with some and help Scotland be a nation again on the footballing front.
“I went to the Scottish Sports Awards the other night and I was sitting next to the rector of Larbert High School and it was fascinating and inspiring,” said Mackay. “He’s got over 20 PE teachers now and he begs, steals and borrows funding from everywhere. What he does with the 20 PE teachers is that he floods the seven primary schools that feed into his high school. This is in all sports, not just football. His belief is that kids at that age getting into different sports makes them more rounded, makes them open to education and feeds the whole thing. Can I have that all over Scotland please?”
Sitting in the bowels of Hampden, Mackay was back to where it all began having started off at Queen’s Park all those years ago. It wasn’t quite in times when everybody spoke Latin but the club’s motto of Ludere causa Ludendi - to play for the sake of playing – helped shape Mackay’s footballing philosophy.
“Football is my passion, my life,” said the 44-year-old. “I’ve been around here (Hampden) since I was five. My father has been involved here for 56 years as a player, coach and committee member, which meant I was around a football club a lot at a young age. That breeds passion into you When I played here I wasn’t getting paid, I was working in a bank, but football was my passion. It still is. It’s work ethic. Put the time and the effort in, whether you are a coach or a player. When you are a manager out of work you try other things, you try other sports. I went over to America and went and saw the coach of the Seattle Seahawks American football team and it’s the best sporting environment I’ve ever been in because of the culture. The American coaches are intelligent people who know how to get people to work for them. It’s through respect and taking time to invest in players. I went up to an ice hockey team in Vancouver. It was a different beast. The Vancouver Canucks, they are the Hollywood of hockey, but they are blue collar, they play 200 games a year, even with broken noses and broken fingers. For me those trips were about seeing different things and different people to see how we can get the best out of our people.”
Back in those halcyon times of 1928, Scotland’s diminutive Wembley Wizards rang rings round England’s bulky brutes en route to a famous 5-1 win which is still revered to this day. The game has changed a bit since then and in an era of athleticism, the Scots seem to be wheezing along in the slow lane. “If we talk about strength and the power of boys, some of our guys at 25, 26 take their tops off at the end of the game and they look 12 years old,” said Mackay. “We’ve got to be stronger looking, we’ve got to look like athletes, we’ve got to run like athletes.”
Mackay is looking to the future but he will certainly lean on the wisdom from the past. Sir Alex Ferguson, Walter Smith, Craig Brown, Andy Roxburgh? “There’s nothing they can't help with,” he said. "I was lucky enough recently to meet Walter in the past few years and we need to be tapping into people like him. Sir Alex is an obvious one as well, I've had a lot of contact with him over the past 10 years. These guys - and the likes of Andy Roxburgh and Craig Brown - are the best minds in Scotland football wise.”
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