JABBA THE AGNIVORE

BACK TO THE FUTURE

David Longmuir. I don't know about you but I'd never heard of the man before last summer. In fact, Mrs Longmuir probably hadn't heard of him before last summer. He is in charge of the SFL, a pretty unimportant position before this season. Now, however, he's the Messiah, the saviour-in-waiting of Scottish football; a man with his finger on the pulse, a man of integrity, a giant in the sporting world, a man....well, you get the idea!

There's no surprise, then, that Keith Jackson is telling us all in the Daily Record that we should be following Longmuir's plans for league reconstruction. Longmuir's proposals include a top tier of 16. Apparently everyone is bored with watching 'the same matches' over and over. This begs the question that nobody seems willing to ask: why was a premier league set up in the first place?

In the 1970s harsh realities were facing Scottish football. Everyone was bored with the same teams being relegated from the First Division and then popping back up the next season only to be relegated again at the end of that season. Celtic and Rangers fans were refusing to pay to go and see their teams slaughter Durness Women's Institute XI, or whatever. Scottish football had reached a crisis. The solution: a more competitive league consisting of Scotland's top teams. 

So David Longmuir's solution is to go back to the position in the early 1970s, which everyone was fed up with! Radical thinking, eh? If he had come up with this idea a couple of years ago then our sports meeja would have rolled about laughing. Now, of course, things are different. David Longmuir is the man that wanted to shoehorn Rangers straight into the First Division and was only stopped by all the member teams of the SFL. To the agnivores of the Scottish press, then, he is a man of integrity and forward thinking!

Scottish football has changed a lot; more so in the last thirty years than it had in the hundred years that went before. As late as the 1980s football was still all about getting people through the turnstiles and only very rarely would you see a match on the TV. Even if there was a huge match taking place the TV companies were not allowed to show it if Sutherland Shepherds were playing Glasgow Gas Meter Readers on the same evening. All of our sporting commentators decried this ridiculous situation and, eventually, it changed. Nowadays TV channels can even dictate what time a match starts at!

The Premier League was exciting in the 1980s; it was a league of equals, where Dundee United and Aberdeen could dominate for a while and Hearts could challenge Celtic for the championship. So what went wrong? Two words: David Murray. His reckless spending of money he didn't have led to Rangers dominating Scottish football for over a decade. Celtic nearly went bankrupt but had to spend as well to present any kind of challenge at all. The other Premier League teams had to spend too but certainly could not compete with the kinds of resources to hand, ie borrowing power, of Celtic and, more so, Rangers.

Of course, this spending couldn't last forever and Rangers paid the price for their recklessness. Other teams might possibly be heading the same way. So how do our sports meeja react to this? Remember, for years they went along with the Thatcherite 'devil-take-the-hindmost' philosophy and we had to leave the old days behind and look to the future. Airdrie being put out of business was just the way things went and nobody shed any tears when Gretna overreached and got badly burned in the process. That was the way things were: football was a business and we all had to face up to life in the modern age.

Strangely those opinions have changed, and changed radically! We are supposed to go back to some Sunday Post-Land where every man in Scotland will have their half-day holiday on a Saturday and troop off to the football match in their work clothes and flat caps. This, as they well know, would not work. With breathtaking hypocrisy they also tell us that it's not healthy for one team to dominate Scottish football! Meanwhile, New Rangers, just like the old one, is spending more on wages to win Division 3 than many SPL teams can afford. This, however, passes without comment!

The only way Scottish football will get any better is if limits are put on what teams can spend. This, however, is unlikely to be supported as, when the transfer embargo is over, Rangers will throw money at winning their way up the leagues. Equally ticket prices need to come down. One only has to look at Ibrox to see what happens when the prices are reduced: increased crowds. Again, Green is planning on putting ticket prices up so this idea is dead in the water too.

If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that our sports 'journalists' were only concerned about the interests of one team and not the whole of Scottish football at all. But, that can't be true, can it?