Important week in club's history looming...
Saturdays result at Kilmarnock hammered home what we've known for sometime. It'll take an almighty turnaround to keep us in the top league.'Too many people off form', 'not our day' or 'beaten by a better team'. Regular reasons for our regular defeats. And its happened too many times this season to think that it will miraculously change in what are a massive three games in seven days.However, ask me in two weeks when we are off the bottom spot after putting Hearts, Ross County and most importantly, Dundee, to the sword and I'll tell you a different story full of positivity. I love being a fickle football fan.Sam Miller can be found at the Dogger Saints podcast, external
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Scotsman
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Hearts favourites leaves coaching role as ex Jambo replaces him at Scottish club
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an hour ago
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The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
The national-team ticking time-bomb the SFA must do more to address
Regardless of who stands on the Hampden touchline, there's a time-bomb ticking under Scotland's national team. An international coach doesn't have the luxury of spending a few quid in the transfer market. And Clarke is cursed by a pool of goalkeepers, central defenders, wingers and strikers as shallow as a Pollokshields puddle. Unless that changes, the problem will plague his successor and every manager after that as well. The SFA have a plan to tackle the dearth of new and emerging talent. If it goes the same way as the think tanks of yesteryear, performances like that Hampden horlicks against Iceland will be the way of things in future. Study the current crop of players in the national team and Billy Gilmour, Kieran Tierney, Nathan Patterson, Aaron Hickey, Lewis Ferguson, Ben Doak, Andrew Robertson, John McGinn and Ryan Christie were all playing first-team football by the age of 18. That matters because kids in the tricky transition phase between 16 and 21 need to learn what the game's all about. And a thread on social media by Stenhousemuir assistant manager Brown Ferguson shows what a terrible job clubs in the SPFL Premiership are doing of bringing through talented footballers. In season 2021/22, the overall percentage of Scots starting games in the top flight was 45 per cent. This season, the figure dropped to 31.46 per cent. Just 41 of the 132 players who started Premiership games in an average week were Scottish. Depressingly, only four of that 132 were under the age of 21. Luka Modric made his first start at 17, Erling Haaland at 15, Martin Odegaard at 14 and Josip Gvardiol at 17. While no one should delude themselves that there's a Lamine Yamal hiding away in the Reserve League of the SPFL, no one knows for sure what's down there because academy players in Scotland have a limited chance of showing what they can do. Cursed by a lack of trust, managers don't feel they have the time or the breathing space to take a punt on the kids. And, given what happened to Tony Docherty, you can almost see their point. A report by the CIES football observatory shows that Dundee gave more minutes to players aged 21 and under than any other team in the Scottish Premiership this season. The Dens Park hierarchy are never slow to remind people how much they care about youth development. Yet sometimes it pays to study the actions and not the words. By blooding Lyall Cameron, Josh Mulligan, Luke Graham, Sebastian Palmer-Houlden, Olaswaseun Adewumi, Ethan Ingram, Finn Robson and Cesar Garza in the first team, Docherty effectively signed his own P45. Tony Docherty gave Lyall Cameron time to shine at Dundee (Image: Rob Casey - SNS Group) The minute the men upstairs realised their bright young things were knee high in the relegation brown stuff, they took fright and sacked him. Clubs can't have this both ways. They can't perform a song and dance about their record of fielding academy graduates on one hand. Then sack the manager who picked them with the other. Read more: Ferguson on how Scotland squad feel about Iceland debacle Iceland keeper tells Scotland rookie how to bounce back from errors They can't encourage managers with a fraction of the resources of Celtic and Rangers to pitch young players into the team. Then lose patience and replace them with Steven Pressley as soon as they hit a bit of turbulence. Contrast Docherty's fate with that of Stephen Robinson at St Mirren. Last season the Saints coached served up a pitiful 0.8 per cent of first-team minutes to players aged 21 or under. In mitigation Evan Mooney, 17, came off the bench eight times, claiming a terrific assist in a Paisley win over Rangers, then broke his foot. Another teenager, Callum Penman, was another who saw bits and bobs of first-team action. Give Robinson his due. Flooding the team with experienced, physical imports from clubs like Gillingham, Morecambe and Waterford seems to work. Fans couldn't give two hoots about the direct football or the lack of academy prospects in the team so long as they're storming the top six year after year. In a footballing utopia Robinson would blood Mooney and Penman in the first team and give them a chance to shine. In the real world managers see Docherty taking a bullet to the head in Dundee and make a subconscious note to avoid the same mistake. The pitiful plight of the Scotland national team is not the problem of Robinson or Derek McInnes or Jimmy Thelin. In a landscape where the average tenure of a Scottish Premiership coach is 12.75 months, they've enough on their plate simply hanging on to their job. Responsibility for fixing this mess falls, as it should, on the shoulders of the SFA. There's not much they can do about the production line of talented young players being lured south at the age of 16 by big signing-on fees. Overseen by chief football officer Andy Gould and head of men's elite strategy Chris Docherty, club cooperation agreements might do something to address the lack of a first-team pathway. From June 16, three players at a time can flit between Rangers and Raith Rovers or, say, Aberdeen and Cove with flexibility. Players with promise will go down to the lower leagues and learn how to mix it with grown men. For some the experience will be a triumph, for others a disaster. However it pans out they'll learn more from a brief taste of life in the real world they ever will holed up in the pampered never-land of a club academy An initiative worth the effort, cooperation agreements should be part of a package of measures. Not the only one. As things stand the Governing Body Appeal system awards too many work permits to average overseas players. They could look at that for a start. The SFA are also in the process of handing applications for millions of pounds in Pitching Up facilities funding from some of the nation's top clubs. That cash really should be conditional on those clubs agreeing to blood a quota of young players in the first team. No minutes, no money. By hook or by crook, the SFA need to fix this. If they can't, the Tartan Army can look forward to more Ciaran Slickers being slung in to a lion's den they're hopelessly unprepared for. With predictable results.
