Fitba Hell

The fitba pundits have been counting this down for years now: Kris Boyd will soon overtake Henrik Larsson as the all-time SPL top scorer.

What a totally meaningless observation. Does anyone else find it ihighly irritating that the dawn of the SPL 10 years ago is routinely taken as a Year Zero for the Scottish game? The constant citing of SPL statistics implicitly devalues all that went before for 100 years and more. So Boyd is held up against Larsson, but not Jimmy McGrory, Joe Harper, or even Ally McCoist.

The same thing happens in England. Jermaine Defoe scored five today, a joint Premier League record according to Radio Five Live. In other words, a record if we discount any goalscoring feats before 1992-93. Rupert Murdoch will be happy about such amnesia, suggesting as it does that the only period of English football which matters began when Sky threw open its coffers.

But going back to the SPL, what exactly is so different in this footbaling Age of Aquarius? Well, there's one big thing: few could deny that standards have plummeted in the last 10 years. So Boyd should have a word with any pals he has in the media, and tell them to stop harping on about the SPL. His stats would look a whole lot more impressive held up against all the legends of the Scottish game, and not just the mediocrity of the last decade.

I was a naïve 18-year-old when I arrived at Glasgow University in 1993, never having been to Scotland's biggest city before for more than a couple of hours. I’d grown up in Aberdeen, disliking Celtic and Rangers purely because they were big teams who got in the way of my team’s hopes of winning trophies; I had only the vaguest awareness of their sectarian affiliations. The last 16 years have been an education, and I still haven’t got my head round the warped logic of Old Firm allegiance.

It’s been thoroughly depressing to see pea-brained bigots trying to twist Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day to their own agenda. Depressing to hear a band of Celtic fans singing in protest outside the Falkirk Stadium during a minute’s silence on Sunday. But equally depressing to read about the indignant ravings of those Rangers fans who hijack the poppy for their own anti-Catholic agenda. Depressing to hear the editor of fanzine Not the Celtic View saying that he “neither condemns not condones” the incident at Falkirk, depressing to see the moral high ground subsequently claimed by internet ranters who would blithely sing about being “up to our knees in Fenian blood”.

Armistice Day is not about the glorification of the British military, as the above would have us believe. Most of all, it is for sombre reflection on how close the world came to cataclysm in the 20th century. How depressing to see the poppy sucked into the poisonous little vortex of Old Firm squabbling.

Never mind whether Newcastle have sold out with their new stadium name. I'm more interested in the epic amount of syllables that have been squeezed in: there's a grand total of 13 in the (draws breath) sportsdirect.com @ St James's Park Stadium. Bloody hell, the Gettysburg Address wasn't much longer.

Part of me is reluctant to write anything about this. The branding experts behind this decision must have known there'd be an outcry and that no fan would ever use the ludicrous new name. They will also have known, though, that the more ridiculous they made it, the more it would become a talking point. So they surrounded "St James's Park" with some faddy lower-case letters and a dash of tautology (isn't a professional football team's park always accompanied by a stadium?) Then they rubbed their hands in anticipation of newspapers' mocking sports op-eds and the outrage-fuelled phone-ins. And there you go: how many of us are talking about a sports shop chain that only existed on the fringes of our consciousness last week?

The new name is not the result of some corporate numbskulls' incompetence, but a calculated attempt to get some leverage for a brand, precisely by reducing an iconic sporting venue to a laughing stock - and in doing so, flicking an even mightier two fingers to the Newcastle fans than some might have realised.

The Highland League is like French pop music: a familiar form in a bizarre parallel world. Like Serge Gainsbourg singing about men with cauliflowers for heads or suicidal ticket collectors (youtube.com/watch?v=HsX4M-by5OY), it has a whole lot to recommend.

It's home to some of the world's most evocatively-named football teams: all hail Buckie Thistle, Forres Mechanics and Clachnacuddin. There are so many crazily high-scoring games that anything less than a 5-5 draw with seven sendings off and a refereeing fatality in a freak seagull collision leaves spectators tinged with disappointment. Not to mention hard men so uncompromising they make Vinnie Jones look like guy from the Domestos ads, and the grisly pleasure of seeing how many Fort William get humped by each week.

Sadly, as my friends at Inside Left document elsewhere - www.insideleft.net - the plight of Clach shows the Highland League is as vulnerable to the vagaries of global economics as anything else.

If you're anywhere near places like Wick, Rothes, Fraserburgh or Turriff, get along to see these towns' teams play. The games are entertaining and the welcome warm, as I can testify from when my stag-do stopped for several hours at Cove Rangers' dinky Allan Park (capacity about 1,500). Our waitress in the hospitality section - which was a smidgeon of the cost for a far stuffier affair at Pittodrie - would not stop bullying us to quaff free booze. It was the first time I'd seen a stag party protest that they'd really rather stop drinking now, thanks very much.

Marlon King is a thug and bully, but also possessor of an arrogance inversely proportional to his talent. I can just about stomach a bit of posturing from Cristiano Ronaldo or Didier Drogba. But Marlon King? Just how good is he?

Bear with me here.

At the time of the offences that led to his conviction this week, he was a Wigan player but had been sent out on loan to Hull City. So he was surplus to the requirements of the first-team squad at a mediocre Premier League club, but got a few games at a team that escaped relegation by a point. Let's say every top-flight English team has a first-team pool of about 30, as Wigan do. 30x20 = 600. King was lucky if he was the 500th most desirable player in the English Premier League (before he plummeted to No 600 this week).

Let's now work on the basis that the Spanish, Italian, German and French leagues are of a roughly similar standard. That's another 2,400 players. The top halves of the Greek, Turkish, Portugese, Dutch and Russian leagues aren't bad: another 1,500 players. Let's say there's an average of five teams that would give Wigan a game in the Scottish, Belgian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Austrian, Swiss, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian and Czech leagues. That's another 1,650 players. Say 10 lesser leagues across the continent can each muster the equivalent of two Premier League squads: 600 players.

Brazil? OK, Europe might routinely plunder their best players, but this is still the planets's greatest football nation, so let's throw all 20 Série A teams into the mix: 600 players. We'll take a modest average of five teams each from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay and Colombia; moving north, the same for Mexico and the USA: 1,650 players.

Africa's Champions League could easily pull together 20 teams who'd have no fear going to the JJB or the KC: 600 players. The Japanese and South Korean leagues aren't all that bad - five teams each? 300 players. We're up to 9,800, but surely we can cobble together another 200 from the rest of the world who wouldn't embarrass themselves in a relegation dogfight against Wolves or Burnely.

In other words, Marlon King might just about scrape into the 10,000 best players in the world.

The 10,000th best tennis player in the world goes for a knockabout down at his local club before heading home for a curry and the CSI double-bill; the 10,000th best gymnast in the world does some cursory acrobatics in a grubby circus; the 10,000th best ice hockey player failed the auditions for Estonia's version of Dancing on Ice. King, meanwhile, reportedly makes £35,000 a week for not being all that good at his trade.

King went to jail for punching and breaking a slightly-built girl's nose after she dismissed his unwanted advances. Before he threw that blow, he hit her with the almost-as-stunning revelation that he was a millionaire and she was a fool not to recognise him.

Never mind anything else this unpleasant man has done - he deserves locking away to recuperate from the extreme delusional state he's found himself in.

Rangers gave free tickets to the military for their champions League game on Tuesday. Take a look at the bloke with the scarf on the left-hand side. Isn't the British Army meant to be the neutral upholder of law and order during contoroversial Orange marches? PR gone wrong, if ever I saw it.

(Image originally shown here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/8317426.stm )

Hilarious. Chelsea aren't allowed to sign anyone for another 16 months. Now if that ban could only be extended to all the other European football behemoths, football might start getting interesting again.

Why is it that so many people think football exists in a moral vacuum? Mark McGhee was the subject of vile abuse from a section of Motherwell supporters last week, which doesn't deserve repeating in any form. These people wouldn't try to get away with it at work, at the theatre, in a restaurant, on the bus, at the shops - or, in my experience, while watching any other sport. So why is it tolerated at football?

Back in the mid-1980s, Aberdeen and Everton won the European Cup Winners' Cup within two years of each other. Both teams had a period where they could justifably lay claim to being the best side in Europe: Aberdeen beat then-European champions Hamburg in December 1983 to win the Super Cup; a superb Everton side won the English league twice in two years, but were denied the chance to lift the European Cup in the aftermath of the Heysel disaster.

A few weeks ago, Aberdeen were hammered 8-1 on aggregate by Sigma Olomouc, the heaviest European defeat for a Scottish side in nearly 50 years. Earlier this week, Everton swatted aside the same Czech outfit 4-0 - and that on the back of their 6-1 thrashing by Arsenal days earlier. On Saturday, their threadbare squad stretched to the limit, Aberdeen gave a debut to 16-year-old Fraser Fyvie, the youngest player to play for the first team in the club's 106-year history. Everton, meanwhile, are expecting to rake in £22million from Manchester City for a middle-of-the-road central defender, Joleon Lescott. The chasm in resources between English and Scottish football has reached unprecedented proportions.

Part of the appeal of football is that, because of the low-scoring, just about any side can beat any other side with the right combination of organisation, guts and luck. But the charm of the underdog is fast fading into memory. An ever-smaller number of clubs is dominating European football; an ever-smaller number of clubs is dominating football in England, home to the world's richest league. The sheer spending power of the bigger teams is eliminating the unpredictability of football, one of its biggest assets. The biggest clubs, of course, want to rule out any chance of smaller teams preventing them from gorging on the wealth of the Champions' League by cutting ties with the small fry and forming a European league. The day that happens is the day the lights go out.

Barry Ferguson comes out before a crucial Scotland game and whinges about the way the SFA made him persona non grata. A few days earlier, Darren Fletcher had said representing Scotland at the World Cup would surpass anything he's achieved with Manchester United. Fletcher's reverence for the World Cup reveals an intelligent mind and an understanding of football history. Ferguson, in stark contrast, always found it far easier to get motivated about Scottish football's domestic baubles; playing for Scotland often looked a chore for him.

International football is frequently run down these days, but it's at the World Cup that indelible reputations are made. Salvatore 'Toto' Schillaci's name is fresh in the memory of anyone who had even a passing interest in Italia '90, like my wife or my mum, to whom more talented Italian strikers of the 1990s such as Enrico Chiesa, Pierluigi Casiraghi and Guiseppe Signori are unkowns. It's at the World Cup that the greatest - Maradona, Pele, Cruyff - rubberstamp their talent before the watching world. But overachieving journeymen can leave legacies, too. Who'd have thought a diminutive, balding Scot would score one of the best World Cup goals of all time? How many people would remember Archie Gemmill if he hadn't?

Decades from now, when Ferguson is forgotten, the exploits of Schillaci and Gemmill will still be revered. Missed your chance, Barry.

Even some of the more sensible media pundits - Richard Gordon, for one - have been getting stuck into George Burley. It's all just a bit too easy, and a bit of historical perspective is required.

A few decades ago, Norway and the Netherlands were footballing backwaters. Norway have been at least on a par with us for a long time, and the Netherlands long ago left us in their slipstream, Archie Gemmil notwithstanding.

There was a lack of foresight shown about the development of the Scottish game, back when Burley was still in short troosers. This is the country that only sent 13 players to the 1954 World Cup when we were allowed to take 22, because the powers-at-be didn't think it was worth putting up a full squad; we lost 7-0 Uruguay. The country that only recently has realised that putting skinny wee boys out to play on full-size pitches might not be the best idea, that the Dutch were onto something with their small-sided matches and focus on youngsters' skills over winning trophies.

Burley might have done a better job, but we should be looking to the history books for the root cause of Wednesday's humiliation.

So Real Madrid have bought Xabi Alonso for a mere £30million, the latest blow in their tit-for-tat with Manchester City to see who can spend the most grotesque amount of money this summer. It's like watching rival pantomime dames stuff their bras with ever more ludicrous amounts of tissue.

Football's big boys may blithely carry on paying no heed to the world around them, but the economic realities we're all dealing with are going to hit them sooner or later.

I feel sad more than anything else about Aberdeen's thumping in Europe tonight. Mark McGhee's last game as an Aberdeen player was in a European semi-final in 1984. His first as manager was to lose 5-1 at home in a preliminary round.

I know Aberdeen and Scottish football have been overtaken by forces far beyond their control in the last 25 years. But couldn't more have been done to build long-lasting foundations on the success of a team that, for a time, was Europe's best?

Looks like another of the newer names in Scottish football will soon cease to exist. Not that Livingston FC will be mourned by too many. Like Gretna, they were perceived as Johnny-Come-Latelys who upset the established order by living outwith their means.

But what's more worthy of contempt? A Gretna or Livi who took risks and dared to aspire to success against the odds, or an Albion Rovers or East Stirling, enjoying impunity from relegation and content to bump around the farthest depths of the league structure in perpetuity? There are plenty of better-supported and more ambitious teams in the Highland League, East of Scotland league and the Juniors. Let's open a trapdoor like they have at the bottom of England's Division 2 - it'd be one small step to reinvigorating Scottish football.

A good few years ago I taught English to Sidney Govou. Sidney went on to play for Lyon and France, but at that that time he was a 15-year-old nightmare with a penchant for dancing on tables when he should have been conjugating verbs.

Four years later, I bumped into him at a party after he'd been signed up by Lyon. As people got wasted around him, his presence was conspicuous. He was upright, immaculately turned out, spoke quietly and seriously, and refused umpteen offers of booze and snacks. This was a young man intent on going places.

A few months ago I was on the same train as two Motherwell youth players on their way to training. They were stuffing their faces with Lion Bars and Irn Bru. Sidney would not have approved.