Last night's debacle makes it all too easy for Ally and for us.

26 August 2011 10:45
No strenuous European adventures for Super this season. No, so long as Ally wins the SPL title – that most cherished and prestigious of trophies – he will be considered a success and it will all be forgiven. And you all know it. White, Waddell, Greig and Le Guen are the only Managers of the Rangers never to win a league title. At least one of those was very unlucky in his time in charge and at least one was a horrible disappointment. We don’t know yet what Ally McCoist will be, but we do know that despite all the big talk today there will soon enough be a return to accepting that the two-horse race is all that matters. Whether this is simply because to consider the alternative – that both Glasgow sides are atrocious and our standing in Europe is at an all-time low – is too disturbing or relates more to a dangerous parochial attitude is open to question. What’s not is that any real change to and within Scottish football cannot focus merely on matters as important as facilities, technique, fitness and similar. It’s really all about attitude. In one form it was the key ingredient in so many of our better players from a bygone era, including but not restricted to those who made up the spine and the core of so many of our best British club sides. The need to have a Scot or two in the team at ambitious English clubs was as apparent as the commitment and quality these men brought to their employers. But the gap between the forms of the game played at the top level in each country is now so wide that it would as well be described as resembling two different codes. The attitude of the players in a period where they hold more power than ever before is interesting to attempt to consider: there’s nothing wrong with them demanding and receiving what are often labelled obscene contracts when without them we wouldn’t have a game to watch but there’s more than a suspicion that some are reaping the rewards of a windfall while not doing as much to earn it as those who are truly professional in attitude and performance. Where once such as Jock Wallace would torture players on the sand at Gullane the balance has shifted to the point where it seems some officials are unwilling to demand more of the players in an attempt to improve them. How else do you explain the two and a bit hour day which seems common at SPL clubs? Forget for a moment the excitable demands to have players running around all day - we must accept the benefits of rest and maintaining the balance of a modern athlete’s body – and ask why those, many of whom slightly more high-profile than even the best the SPL has to offer, who have been so most popularly associated with extra practice sessions have so often made the most of their talents? In a fit of rage punters will ask why players cannot stay behind and work more on set-pieces or individual aspects to improve weaknesses in their game and they will question if, instead of going home to watch DVDs or make shout-outs on Twitter to join in online games, it might occasionally be more beneficial if players were at Auchenhowie watching films and footage about the game, in an attempt to learn from mistakes and to encourage some development in the area so often neglected in the work-out of the average player: the brain. We know very little of what really happens on a day-to-day basis at training but when we have only the evidence of our own viewing – and the often unwatchable nature of what transpires in games to burn those eyes – it is hard to believe that the attitude of the players or of the Club in seeking to make the most of those professional athletes is as it could or should be. But what of our attitude: that of the average or even the self-important super fan? Today it is popular to shout (or maybe type) “Sack the manager!” but others will consider that Ally deserves more time and others still will wonder if the whole situation with a new owner having to indulge a manager he didn’t choose and yet would be loathe to sack is in any way ideal. But it is in our approach to what matters as a Club that is most troubling. For every aesthete who can detail and regale us with stories of innovative and fresh ways of thinking and coaching we have a subway carriage full of people for whom the be all and end all of Rangers, sport and life as we know it is simple: beat Celtic and all is well, regardless of how good, bad or indifferent they may be. It would be ludicrous to diminish the rivalry or to disregard all that makes it what it was, is and will remain but it is equally improbable that we have yet to seriously contemplate other means of grading and demonstrating our success as a Club. Evolution is often a slow process over vast periods of time which in our small gift of life we can’t hope to properly appreciate but do we now have to place faith that it can happen in our small country and our small sub-section of the footballing family? Simply being the better of two sides (and it is only two who count for now and the foreseeable future) while dismissing the importance or even the existence of other forms of life can’t be all there is for us in the footballing Universe. Attendances may have dipped but will people decide that they can cast aside the shackles of tribalism, habit and irrational loyalty and simply stop propping up this artificial situation? If not in that area, how then can fans get across their disillusionment and disgust at the way the national game is heading? Already the jibes from within and without are being aimed at McCoist, Rangers and our game as a whole. There is no adequate defence to be made at this point. If not quite the two bald men arguing over a comb this season’s SPL will in fact be two deluded Clubs arguing over a prize in danger of becoming so devalued that the very nature of our domestic football becomes redundant. In a commonly-expressed ‘joke’ it is believed that if you furnish a monkey with a red rosette and put it forward as the candidate for Scottish Labour in some west of Scotland parliamentary elections the furry primate would be returned. The job as head coach of the main Glasgow sides is too high-pressured and burdensome for most - and those monkeys will write Hamlet before it becomes a cushy number – but a future where one of those men is guaranteed to be a winner at the end of each domestic season and is automatically branded a hero is an uncomfortable prospect. Rangers have enjoyed the services of some truly brilliant managers in their long history. Ally McCoist’s start to his tenure hasn’t gone as he or we would have hoped. But if the way we judge our players, our club and ourselves doesn’t change then neither he nor his successors will sit comfortably in their company.

Source: FOOTYMAD