'I still fancy us to upset the odds'
It's the hope that kills you. For three brief minutes on Saturday afternoon we had eaten up all 10 of the points we were adrift by.A Simon Murray equaliser and a share of the spoils away to Dundee wasn't a disaster. It wasn't a must-win game, more a must not lose.With that achieved and momentum still on our side, it's still a two-horse race for the trap door, but I still fancy us to upset the odds. Again.The Scottish Cup quarter-final at Livingston this weekend will be a great gauge to see how we fare against a title contender. We might just be facing one of them come the end of May.Sam Miller can be found at Dogger Saints, external
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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. 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