Wings Over Scotland

Just the facts.

RECORD IN COMPETITIVE MATCHES

Berti Vogts P13 W5 D4 L4
George Burley P8 W3 D1 L4
Craig Levein P10 W3 D4 L3

PERCENTAGE OF GAMES WON

Berti Vogts 38.5
George Burley 37.5
Craig Levein 30

PERCENTAGE OF POINTS WON

Berti Vogts 48.8
George Burley 42
Craig Levein 43.3

Berti Vogts was building a young team from scratch after the veteran side of Craig Brown disintegrated, and still got us to the [EDIT: Euro 2004] playoffs. He was sacked after 13 competitive games. George Burley was being constantly undermined from within by his own players, from above by the SFA and from outside by the media. He was sacked after just eight competitive games.

Craig Levein has more players from the top divisions in England and Scotland at his disposal than any Scotland manager of the last decade. He has now led the team through 10 competitive games, and won significantly fewer of them (against worse opposition) than either Vogts or Burley. He has comprehensively lost the faith of the Scotland support. If we are to maintain even the slightest hope of qualification for World Cup 2014, his time is up. He must go, and he must go now.

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We’ve never in our entire lives wanted Scotland to do anything other than win a football match. Tonight, that might change. The dismal but all-too-predictable performance against Serbia on Saturday was another soul-crushing 90 minutes under Craig Levein. His tactic of playing every game looking for a 1-0 win on the counter-attack, despite having a defence almost totally incapable of keeping a clean sheet, was thrown into sharp relief last night as Andy Murray – once a notoriously passive and defensive tennis player who regularly failed at the last (or second-to-last) hurdle – finally completed his transformation into an attacking powerhouse capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of the brutally talented Novak Djokovic and winning.

From Levein’s pronouncements since the feeble 0-0 draw with Djokovic’s Serbian countrymen at the weekend, the Scotland coach shows no signs of learning the lesson of Murray’s magnificent victory, and seems perversely determined to stick to a losing formula as much out of sheer stubborn petulance as anything else.

Starting the qualifying group with two home points from six would leave Scotland with a mountain to climb, but with eight games to come it wouldn’t be a completely insurmountable one. The catch, however, is that it WOULD by any sane analysis be an impossible task with Levein as manager.

If he plays this defensively at home – and incredibly, it’s by no means inconceivable that he’ll once again line up in a few hours in 4-1-4-1 formation with Kenny Miller alone up front – it’s safe to say our chances of securing the away wins we’d need to stand a chance would be nil. And more to the point, even four points from six are unlikely to be enough with the best teams in the group still to come, if we keep playing this way.

Scotland fans who don’t want the next two years to be over before they’ve begun now face a gruesome reality. Victory over Macedonia would secure Levein’s position for the forseeable future, which would almost certainly doom the qualification attempt to failure. Two more dropped points, on the other hand, might just be enough to see him sacked. The national side currently has a more talented group of players available than at any time in the last decade, and is stronger in attack than in defence for perhaps the first time in 20 years. A more positive manager might well still be able to save the campaign, even from such an inauspicious start.

But tonight’s game is the last point at which that will be true. The next round of matches sees us away to Wales and Belgium, and if Levein is allowed to oversee the dropping of any more points there then the situation will be utterly irretrievable. In this blog’s view, Scotland’s only hope of qualifying for World Cup 2014 is to draw tonight. (A defeat would be a catastrophe too far for any manager to recover.)

So do we pray for victory over 90 minutes no matter what, or take the long-term view? This blog, for more than just footballing reasons, finds itself – albeit uncomfortably, reluctantly and painfully – in the latter camp. What do you think? The poll’s at the top of the grey column just to the right of these words.

We haven’t had any football-related posts in weeks, but this is an emergency. Many in the independence movement are hoping that 2014 will be the sort of year for them that 2012 has been for advocates of the UK. With the Commonwealth Games and Ryder Cup taking place in Scotland and the World Cup in Rio, a lot of people are hoping for an upsurge in patriotism which might just carry the referendum vote over the line.

But more than two years out, one man might wreck it all before it even gets started.

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The CBI Director-General, John Cridland, came north this week to tell Scotland we shouldn’t be independent. He has every right to do so. But what he has no right to do is use half-truths as the basis for his scaremongering.

I hear that Mr Cridland told the CBI Annual Dinner in Glasgow on Thursday night that the “immediate effects [of independence] would be profound, and in the short term costly. When Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic, it cost the country four per cent of its GDP in the following year.” But what Mr Cridland won’t tell us is what happened next.

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As penance for our sins, yesterday we went for a bit of a wade through the Better Together campaign’s official Facebook page, where we played a fun game of “watching dissenting comments vanish” for a while. As we browsed, though, we particularly enjoyed the upbeat entry for August 21st:

And the entry just two days later showed the campaign was as good as its word.

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You tend to expect legal professionals to be a bit more careful with their words than this. Over the last few days we’ve been documenting the bizarre mental collapse of staunch Scottish Labour activist Ian Smart, a practising solicitor from Cumbernauld who’s managed to arrive at the conclusion that there won’t be an independence referendum at all, but if there is and there’s a Yes vote then Scotland will almost instantly degenerate into a poverty-stricken fascist dictatorship with no elections, 100% unemployment, compulsory Gaelic in schools and cannibalism in the streets.

We don’t plan to carry on doing so beyond today, because right now it’s starting to feel like laughing at a car crash while the fire brigade are still frantically trying to saw bodies out before the petrol tank goes up. But the extraordinary breakdown Mr Smart suffered late last night on his Twitter account isn’t an isolated incident among Labour figures at the moment, and we’re a bit worried there could be a toxic leak of some sort in the water system at John Smith House which might harm innocent visitors.

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An alert reader points out a story in today’s edition of the once-popular regional periodical. See if you can pick out the curious inconsistency.

Headline: “Concern at decline in PE teacher numbers under SNP”

Third sentence: “However, schools have made up the shortfall by appointing additional PE teachers on temporary contracts – most of them part-time – which has led to an overall increase.”

We’ve emphasised some of the words as a clue. Did you get it?

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Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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It’s funny how often we get accused of being slavish SNP devotees and “cybernats” here at Wings Over Scotland. In reality, while I can’t speak for the other contributors, I’ve voted Liberal Democrat at every election for the past 21 years. (Although I never will again, after the series of betrayals in 2010 and beyond.) Just thought I’d mention it.

The Unionists have deployed a trestle table and some bizarrely faded plastic Union Jacks. We fear the game is up for nationalism from this day forward.

If this is the “unprecedented weekend blitz of campaigning” described in the Herald this week, we’re fairly quivering about the actual war. The above gathering of the No camp features former Secretary Of State for Scotland and Minister for Europe Jim Murphy MP, along with what look like failed Scottish Labour leadership candidate Ken Macintosh MSP and failed Scottish Conservative leadership candidate Jackson Carlaw MSP (though we can’t be 100% certain from the picture).

If that’s the sort of campaigning juggernaut “Better Together” can rustle up for such a collection of big hitters, goodness knows what ordinary footsoldiers are having to work with. We hope and trust that alert cybernats everywhere in Scotland will be gathering pictorial evidence of this mighty strategic onslaught, in order that we might collect it together for another of our always-popular photo galleries.

Our Twitter address is @WingsScotland. Keep us in the loop, readers.

As keen readers will know, this blog is often to be found lamenting the disappointing standards upheld by the Scottish media. We’re especially dismayed when fully-staffed professional newspapers fail to catch spelling errors and typos, such as the one that crept into Brian Monteith’s latest batshit-mental ponderings for the Scotsman.

While bafflingly castigating Alex Salmond for failing to have the referendum at a time advantageous to the Unionist parties, Conservative pundit and former MSP Mr Monteith has inexplicably left an “L” out of one of the words in this sentence:

“Then can we all move on and get back to the real world of sorting out the nation’s problems like having jobs for our youth and care facilities for our elderly”

Sloppily, none of the Scotsman’s subs caught the error. Can you help them, readers?

Well now, that rascal Brer Fox hated Brer Rabbit, on account of he was always cutting capers and bossing everyone around. So Brer Fox decided to capture and kill Brer Rabbit if it was the last thing he ever did! He thought and he thought until he came up with a plan. He would make a tar baby! Brer Fox went and got some tar and he mixed it with some turpentine and he sculpted it into the figure of a cute little baby. Then he stuck a hat on the Tar Baby and sat her in the middle of the road.

Brer Fox hid himself in the bushes near the road and he waited and waited for Brer Rabbit to come along. At long last, he heard someone whistling and chuckling to himself, and he knew that Brer Rabbit was coming up over the hill. As he reached the top, Brer Rabbit spotted the cute little Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was surprised. He stopped and stared at this strange creature. He had never seen anything like it before!

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