It’s time again for Inside Left to take a wee break, so updates will be a little sporadic between now our return in January. But in keeping with tradition, we like to round off the year with our Christmas alphabet. A is for …
Archive for the ‘Off The Ball’ Category
The Scottish Football Christmas Alphabet
Sunday, December 20th, 2009Scottish Football Midweek Round-up
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009Jings, crivens, help ma boab, it’s Wednesday already. The off-season has been going by so slowly that the start of the new league season has caught me by surprise.
And I am glad it’s started. Well, I was until Aberdeen started playing competitive games and ended up shaming the entire north-east back into our crofts. Three games played so far, 11 goals conceded, 2 scored. But there’s no reason to panic, after all, we have a legend at the helm. And don’t forget, we had a bad start to the season last year too, and look where we finished.
So next week we play Hamilton, a sure-fire 3 pointer I reckon. Never mind they beat us last season at this stage also, we’ll gloss over that.
It completely escaped my notice, but the team that struggled to get past the Dons 8-1 on aggregate, Sigma Olomouc, are drawn against shit English side Everton in the first of the Europa League group games later on this week. I’m hoping Everton get a similarly thorough tanking (which is not unfeasible given their own stuffing by Arsenal last week), to prove once and for all that Scottish teams are no worse than English teams (note heavy sarcasm).
Celtic tried to prove that last night against Arsenal, but a combination of dodgy refereeing and Gary Caldwell prevented that truth to be proven once and for all, so we’re just going to ignore that result completely. And I do admit we where perhaps a little over-optimistic in our preview of this game yesterday, but hey, why not big-up Scottish football for once? No one else seems to be doing it.
Also in the group along with Everton and Sigma Thingy are Hearts, the team we’re tipping for third spot in the league this year. They’re taking on a team we once used to have in Subbuteo format – Dinamo Zagreb.
Unlike Hearts, Dinamo are the most successful team in their respective country, ehm, Croatia I think, having won lashings of league titles and shiny silverware. On paper then, expect another classic display of Scottish football at it’s best, considering that Hearts couldn’t even get past Dundee United yesterday.
Meanwhile, over in another corner of Europe, spare a thought for dear Fort William.
For years, the gashest team in senior football had carved out a little niche of terribleness, attracting attention from all corners of the globe, all drawn like flies to a pile of shit to one of the far posts of the Empire – Lochaber – to see for themselves the depths to which Scottish football has plumbed.
But they’ve suddenly got competition for all that media attention that nearly brought large-scale investment from the US: it turns out there’s a team that’s possibly even worse than Fort William.
Grantown-on-Spey side Strathspey Thistle where one of the three teams along with Turriff United and Formartine United promoted from obscurity in the north-east Junior leagues to semi-obscurity in the Highland League last season. So far, their campaign has not exactly got off to a flyer, something which cant be said for the teams that have had the pleasure to play them so far.
In their three games since the season started, Strathspey have conceded a whopping 19 goals, six more than Fort William. On opening day, Strathspey went down 8-1 to Wick Academy, with all the goals coming in the first half, an average of a goal every five minutes, roughly. In their next fixture, their first Highland League fixture on home soil, things got a little better against powerhouse Inverurie, the damage being restricted to only 3 goals. However, it was business as usual the following week when the other football team in Inverness, Clachnacuddin score eight times without reply.
All this makes for an unfamiliar picture: Fort William are no longer propping up the bottom of the table! Quite how long this will last will remain to be seen, but put a mark in your calendars for 28 November when these two giants of the scoreboard meet up!
Livingston finally played their first league game since they emerged out of bankruptcy. The SFA decided to refuse Livi’s desperate attempts at getting themselves re-promoted back into the First Division and upheld their decision to keep the team in the Third Division, a move designed to ensure the club’s long term survival. Or something. I’ve never quite understood how relegating a club one division, let alone two can in any way help a club that’s just struggled to get out of bankruptcy.
Livi where never a huge crowd-drawer in the First division, but down in the Third, when only 632 people turned up to watch game against Montrose, your crowds are going to be massively down, resulting in less income and sponsorship. And this loss of income will just more pressure on the club to survive in already difficult circumstances.
And just to really kill of Livi, the SFA may yet impose further penalties on the club because they refused to play their season-opener against East Stirlingshire. A 15 point deduction has been suggested, something which they’ll no doubt overcome, but it’s a little like getting a spear through the chest, only to discover a gas bill at the end of it. Madness, I tells ye.
So, what is there to look forward to in next week’s fixture list?
Though the tie between Celtic and new boys St. Johnstone looks tasty, without a doubt, the game of the weekend is Sunday’s SPL clash between Rangers and Hearts. Rangers have been suspiciously quiet so far in terms of transfers, but their casual demolition of Falkirk last week set out their intent to chase Celtic all the way this season.
In the First Division, two sides who we reckon will fight it out for promotion this season meet, as Dundee take on Inverness Caley Thistle. Cowdenbeath wont have to travel far to take on Alloa, and down in the Third Division we have the first Angus derby of the season when Forfar travel to Montrose.
Extra Time – A Scottish football round-up
Monday, June 15th, 2009Ah, another week in the wonderful world of Scottish football lies ahead. Generally at this time of year, football bloggers take a break from the keyboards and enjoy a well-earned break from the cut and thrust of blogging about the round ball game, but the close season so far has been anything but closed.
Thankfully as a Scottish football blog we didn’t have to spend too much time talking about all the nonsense surrounding Ronaldo, the most expensive man-child in the world as he finally fecks off to chase his dreams in Madrid or the way he’s spending a lot of time in Paris these days. Neither do we have to waste any column inches to the unfolding fiasco at Newcastle, formerly the biggest club in the north-east of England, and now just another Championship side with hee-haw chance of getting sold or back in the EPL anytime soon, no matter how funny it might be. And as for England and their World Cup qualifying campaign, who gives a good fart if they beat Andorra (the world’s only international pub team) or Kazakhstan, whereverthehellthatis. Not us, that’s for sure.
Up here in Scotland, within hours and days of the end of the season, we had three clubs without a manager, one club losing nearly all their players (retaining only enough to field a 5-a-side team plus 1 reserve), two clubs battling to stay in existence and one television station within days of going under, taking all their revenue, and possibly one or two SPL clubs with them. And we’re only half-way through June!
Yes, no time was lost getting rid of the deadwood. Or to be more precise, Jimmy Calderwood. The Aberdeen manager was sent packing right after he managed to secure European football for the second time in three years as well as finishing in the top four for the fifth time in six years.
If that’s the kind of form that gets you fired in Scotland, there’s going to be a lot of managers changing jobs up here soon.
Calderwood committed the cardinal sin of not winning any silverware (i.e. domestic cups) all of which is bad enough, but ‘not winning silverware’ translates roughly to ‘going out to lower leage opposition twice in a row’ which is unforgivable. The perma-tan former Dunfermline manager was sent packing, along with the rest of his backroom staff. Not many tears where shed by the Aberdeen faithful, his obvious Rangers bias coming through more often than not (and we’re not just talking about his orange hue).
Meanwhile, across the country, Gordon Strachan (aka ‘Wee Gordon Strachan’) threw in the towel at Celtic after he narrowly missed out on winning the title for the fourth time in row. It would have taken a minor miracle for Celtic to have won the league on that final day, requiring Rangers to lose to United and Celtic to score, oh, a whole bunch of goals against Hearts. Unlike Calderwood’s sacking, Strachan’s departure surprised few, but delighted many. But like Calderwood, Strachan was never hugely popular at the club. A man not of the Celtic tradition and a man once attacked on the pitch at Celtic Park whilst he was still playing for Aberdeen, he didn’t get off to a great start with that shocker of a result against Artmedia Bratislava all those years ago, but nevertheless he still managed to win the league three years on the trot, the League Cup twice, the Scottish Cup once and pick up three SPFA Manager Of The Year gongs
Not to be outdone, Mixu Paateleinen decided enough mid-table mediocrity was enough, so he too decided to call it a day over at Hibernian. The big Fin, a player managed to get the team into the top half of the table, but that early exit in the Inter Toto Cup (a 4-0 aggregate defeat to IF Elfsborg), together with getting knocked out by Morton in the League Cup made his tenure a long hard slog, much like the football he was accused of getting his teams to play.
So with all the commotion, no time was wasted finding replacement gaffers before the players come back from their short break at Butlins.
Mark McGhee was quickly drafted in to take over at his former club. Well, only after Celtic wouldn’t give him the job that is. To be fair, McGhee never denied that Aberdeen was his second choice after Celtic (a club he played for previously) and who could blame him. As was so delightfully put on BBC Scotland’s Footloose program the other day, if you had the choice of managing your local corner shop or Harrods, you’d not be long deciding.
Hibernian appointed Falkirk manager John ‘Yogi’ Hughes to be the man to take Hibs from 6th to 5th next season. A good choice we reckon. Falkirk have played some really nice attacking football over the last season, and you’d think that with the likes of Fletcher, Nish and Riordan up front, Hibs and Hughes could be quite a quite a threat next season. Or maybe not, if history is anything to go by.
Speaking of Hibs, Celtic are on the verge of bringing Tony Mowbray up north from West Bromwich Albion. Celtic had tried to get Burnley’s Owen Coyle, who clearly fancies a season of getting thumped every week to winning silverware in Scotland as well as Swansea’s Roberto Martinez, a man who would rather manage mid-tablers Wigan in their half empty stadium every week. At the time of writing, the websites where already starting to fill with former WBA players saying they fancy a year north of the border, so clearly the Mowbray deal is now at the personal terms stage, the sticking point now being around whether or not Celtic will agree to the bowl of M&M’s with the blue ones taken out being provided before every game.
We’ve gone on record on this site how we feel about former players returning to manage their former clubs so we’ll not delve into it again here, but good luck to them all we say. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you when we get to Christmas and your team is out of every competition going …
Unfortunately, it’s not all glitz and money in Scottish football. Throughout the season we’ve seen and heard reports about trouble in the lower divisions. Livingston have had problems paying players, while Stranraer (who amassed debts of over £250,000 last season) and Stirling Albion are both launching bids to raise money from the supporters in order to save their respective clubs.
News this week came through about the goings on at Clyde. The ‘Bully Wee’ where relegated from the First Division and this week announced another 12 players who agreed to have their contracts terminated in order to avoid bankruptcy; this follows on from the 13 out-of-contract players already released previously. Manager John Brown has announced open trails next Saturday (June 22nd) to restock the club and secure survival.
While money has always been too tight to mention for the teams in the SFL, it’s not always been a land of milk and honey for the top flight teams either. The threatened demise of Setanta has caused quite a stir north of the border. While the amount of money that the SPL received from the troubled Irish broadcaster is small change compared to the mega-deals on offer to the Barclays Premier League, the £125m investment the Setanta deal promised, represented a sizable chunk of income for many SPL sides. One SPL chairman was quoted as saying that his club’s entire wage bill of £1.5m is paid for by the money from the broadcaster. It’s a situation that is probably echoed at a number of clubs, including Kilmarnock, reputed to have a £12m debt, and Hearts, currently the club in Scotland with the largest net debt, estimated at some £37m. For clubs like St Mirren, Motherwell, Falkirk and even Dundee United, the Setanta money represents about 20-30% of their income.
Last week the Scottish Premier League stepped in to pay the £3m Setanta owed the 12 clubs in the SPL, after Setanta defaulted on the payment. The SPL clearly expect this money to be repaid, and good news arrived when it emerged that a Russian-born billionaire was preparing a £20m takeover of Setanta. However, even if Setanta was to survive, there are doubts about the continuity of the existing deal that Setanta has with the SPL. Clearly, whatever deal the new owners strike with Setanta will involve a reappraisal and renegotiation of the deals already in place. The SPL would be foolish to assume that the new owners are going to carry on with the deal, which would have seen Setanta broadcast live coverage from 2010 onwards.
But the SPL are not in a strong negotiating position. Scottish football – as we’re continually being told, is not an attractive proposition – and interest in the game outside of Scotland is minimal at best. In the interest of the clubs they represent, the SPL would do well to accept whatever deal it gets from the new Setanta, because there simply are no other parties interested in taking over live coverage of Scottish football.
What it means for our clubs is not yet clear, but one thing is for sure: the shockwaves from the Setanta deal could rumble on for seasons to come.
Aberdeen vs St. Mirren
Monday, November 10th, 2008Arrgh, just when you think you’ve got your season back on track with a first home of the season against Kilmarnock, five minutes of defensive insanity sinks the Dons as they lost to Dundee United at the weekend. First, Scott Severin lingers on the ball for too long allowing Gomis to take the ball off him to float a ball over a frankly surprised Zander Diamond for Francisco Sandaza to put the ball in the net. I mean, a player with that kind of experience should just hoof that ball into the car park, rather than even running the risk of losing possession. And then, just when it could not get any worse, for the second goal, the entire Aberdeen defence was bypassed for Warren Feeney to fire in from pretty much on the goal line. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.
Certainly the second half was much better once Young and Hodgkiss where replaced for Mulgrew and McDonald respectively. Sone Aluko finally came into his own once Mulgrew arrived, getting more space down the wings to fire in the crosses, one of which was eventually headed in by Darren Mackie. The goal set up an exciting end to the game which also saw an Aberdeen goal ruled out for offside, but while the second half (and in particular the last half hour or so) showed promise, Aberdeen’s defensive blunders, coupled with a bit of physical presence to impose themselves on the United strikers cost us three valuable points.
And so, with that mixed performance behind us, we take on St. Mirren at Pittodrie. Back at the end of August, a Darren Mackie goal got us the three points in what was then our second win of the season and our first game of the season against the Saints. A home game, should be three easy points right?
A while back we predicted that of the games coming up for the Dons in November, we’d be looking at realistically picking up eight points, namely a draw against United and Hibs away, then home wins over Motherwell and St. Mirren – the game against Rangers we can take for granted. So far we’ve dropped one of our points, but I think that against St. Mirren we should get back on track. St. Mirren have only won two games on the road in six attempts (Caley and Hamilton) while our home record is still nothing to be proud of, despite the win over Killie two Saturdays ago.
Team News
For Aberdeen,defenders Lee Mair and Andrew Considine are both available, while Stuart Duff, Tommy Wright and Bertrand Bossu sit out through injury. Other than that, Jimmy Calderwood has no other selection problems.
For Gus McPhersons side, defender Scott Cuthbert is available for the Saints after recovering from flu.
The dangerman for St. Mirren is obviously their top striker Billy Mehmet. He’s been good for eight goals so far this season so his danger should not be underestimated. For the Aberdeen back line, you’d be hoping they deal better with him than they did with Sandaza and Feeney.
The Midweek Update
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008It’s Wednesday, which means there’s only another few days until we get to swear and generally shout abuse at people we don’t know from behind the safety of a thick line of polis and a great big fence. Ah, we can taste the meaty chunks in our half-time cup of tea already.
Speaking of swearing, abuse and police, the BBC reports that a game between MSP’s (Members of the Scottish Parliament, for those unfamiliar with the acronym) and sports journalists had to be abandoned after half-time when an on-pitch steamie had tempers boiling over. The incident apparently followed a series of ‘contentious’ challenges by both sides, which resulted in BBC journalist Chick Young getting crocked. The MSP team included such luminaries as Ken Macintosh, Andy Kerr and Frank McAveety, while facing them where a team of journalists including the aforementioned Chick Young and Radio Clyde commentator Peter Martin. Normally we’d all chuckle at this but given that we’re always being reminded about the issues that permeate football today (the ‘famine song’ and sectarianism in general, the whole concept of ‘footballers as role models’, managers getting banned from the touchline for abusive behavior to referees, coins being thrown from the crowd as in the recent game at Portsmouth) you’d expect better from those who sit in their ivory towers tutting at the scenes below. The journalists involved will no doubt fill a page in their papers, but you cant help but think that the whole incident was a spectacular own goal.
OK, back to the football. There where a few games in the League Cup last night. Holders Rangers eased past Hamilton for the second time in five days as Kris Boyd and Kyle Lafferty scored to put the Ibrox side into the semi-final hat. They’ll be joined there by Dundee United and Falkirk, who also progressed: United won 1-0 at home to First division Dunfermline, while a Neil McCann header was enough for Falkirk as they beat Inverness Caley.
Slightly disappointing was the attendance at the various games; we appreciate it’s a midweek game, but 32000 at Ibrox, 5300 at Tannadice and 3000 at the Falkirk Stadium is not great. So apart from Falkirk beating Caley, the results went pretty much as you’d expect. We even got a score prediction right when we said United would win 1-0. Actually, it was a bit of reverse psychology. We were secretly hoping that United would lose, so given our history of getting score predictions wildly wrong we figured that predicting a United win would actually see them losing … or something like that. Anyway, it back-fired and now the Arabs and the Bairns are in the next round, where no doubt they’ll get either Celtic or Rangers to ensure that no pish sides with a support that between them wouldn’t fill Hampden in a month of Sundays get into the final. And you can interpret that any way you want.
All round Aberdeen legend and director of football Willie Miller has criticised reputable news sites as well as blogs for spreading rumours about the impending (or not, as the case turned out to be) sacking of manager Jimmy Calderwood. Miller, no doubt still furious at the recent theft of his trademark mustache, went on a bit of rant about fans sites and forums that
“come up with dozens of rumours every single day, the vast majority of which are rubbish, and I would not be at all surprised if this is where this one originated from“.
All quite correct possibly, but that is an interesting choice of words: “the majority of rumours are rubbish”. Now, that implies that a minority of the rumours are, in fact, true. Now, Calderwood is not in any danger in my opinion, but where there’s smoke there’s fire, as I wittily told the firebrigade while they doused the flames on my H-reg Nova Diamond (with alloy wheels) a few years ago. We’re wondering if this is a case of “the lady doth protest too much” ..
It must be something about Edinburgh. The maroon half of Auld Reekie will also have to struggle on without their manager shouting profanities at them from the touchline for the next two games. Hearts boss Csaba Laszlo had to be restrained by Midlothian polis to prevent him lamping referee Steve Conroy following the final whistle. Laszlo was upset – to put it mildly – at Conroy’s reversal of his earlier decision to award Hearts a penalty where it looked as if Jamie Langfield brought down midfielder Michael Stewart inside the box but, after consultation with his linesman, referee Conroy awarded a goal kick to Aberdeen instead and a bronze medal to Stewart for his tremendous dive. For his protests, Laszlo has received a two-game touchline ban, two fewer than Hibs boss Mixu Paatelainen who went spare after his side’s 4-3 defeat at Morton in the League cup a while back.
Speaking of managers, Dundee are still on the hunt for someone to lead the Dee back to the top of the table. Options are fast running out, with Brechin’s Michael O’Neill and Queen of the South’s Gordon Chisholm all ruling themselves out. If negotiations with Jocky Scott and Kenny Black, so far the only names to get an interview fail, there’s always Juande Ramos and Terry Venables, whose name seems to come up with any managers job going these days and who are both probably quite open to a season or two in Dundee, the city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.
Mind you, given the fact that Inside Left has just managed to get Dumbarton promoted to the SPL in his FM2008 game, perhaps we should give them a ring. Has anyone got a number for Dens Park?
