What divides us? Everything!
Nice try, but no cigar.
Whoever thought up the advertising slogan to promote ticket sales for Scotland’s friendly match against Costa Rica at Hampden on Friday night was either born a natural optimist or has a keenly developed sense of humour.
“Whatever divides us, one team unites us” goes the message to have the fans knocking each other over to buy tickets for Alex McLeish’s first game in charge of the national side since succeeding Gordon Strachan.
Whatever divides us?
That’ll be just about everything where Scottish football is concerned. Big Eck’s appointment after Michael O’Neill thought better of the idea put the country into two separate factions for a start. There were those who were underwhelmed by the news and then there were those who were hostile and vehemently opposed to the idea.
Then there’s the SFA themselves. A governing body generally held to be unfit for purpose in the eyes of a dismissive public and now being accused of organising things behind the scenes relative to the appointment of a new CEO to replace Stewart Regan so that the old boys network stays undisturbed.
Even the squad picked by McLeish for his first match has had holes picked in it.
Grant Hanley. Why?
Charlie Mulgrew? Isn’t this supposed to be the dawn of a new era?
And so on and so forth. Not so much a baptism of fire for Eck as a baptism of ire. The only way he can overcome national apathy is to beat Costa Rica convincingly and do the same to the next opponent and the one after that and whoever else follows.
Good luck with the ticket sales as well. A visiting team who could hardly be described as a box office playing at Hampden on a Friday night against an experimental team with nothing at stake for either side in a game being shown live on television?
But what else can McLeish do other than try disprove the theory that he is yesterday’s man installed because cronyism is alive and well and living at Hampden?
Results, as Graeme Murty at Ibrox will no doubt testify, are all that matters.
Back to back defeats for him at home have taken him from a position of strength to the point where his jacket is on the proverbial shaky peg.
Rangers’ seventh home defeat of the season at home, inflicted on them by Kilmarnock on Saturday, is the club’s worst record for 103 years. Murty wasn’t responsible for all seven of those reversals, but he’s in charge now and the likeliehood is he’ll take the rap for everything at the end of the season.
Whatever divides the Rangers support, one team has failed to unite them if Saturday evening’s callers to Superscoreboard are any gauge of public opinion.
And now the disgruntled fans have to fester for two weeks without a game in which Murty’s side might address the need to atone to a disillusioned following, and a friendly international against the might of Costa Rica won’t come as any form of positive distraction for the disaffected.
One caller’s assertion on Saturday evening was that Murty is too nice a man to be successful in management because nice guys don’t put a sense of fear into a dressing room. And he had a point.
All of the successful managers I have encountered professionally over five decades had the ability to reduce grown men to quivering wrecks at will.
Jock Stein. Jock Wallace. Sir Alex Ferguson. Faces that would have stopped a clock if they were displeased and they all had teams that were better for their short fuse.
Murty is personable, articulate, courteous and now involved in a fight to make sure Rangers finish second in the league. Manners maketh nothing but trouble at times.
Still, there’s always Scott Brown to divide us in the meantime.
You would have been excused for thinking Celtic’s captain had sent off Motherwell’s Cedric Kirpe yesterday instead of the referee, Craig Thompson.
The match official over-reacted to the clash between the two players and a yellow card would have been a punishment that fitted the crime where the Motherwell defender was concerned.
Brown “goaded” Kipre into a reaction, according to the Aberdeen manager, Derek McInnes, who recently had one player sent off for a foul on Brown at Pittodrie and another who might have joined him had the referee on that occasion seen him attempt to kick the ball at Brown as he lay stricken on the ground.
Whatever divides us? Broony in the main, it would appear.
What would be the only thing to win unanimous approval after the weekend is the Kilmarnock and Motherwell take all the plaudits for their performances against Rangers and Celtic respectively.
Rangers were deficient and Celtic were negligent but the teams they were playing deserve maximum credit for two clean sheets that perhaps highlight yet one more consequence of the derby fixture from a week ago.
It is as if the demands of that fixture takes its emotional toll of those who played in it. Rangers flopped against their greatest rivals and took a hangover with them into their next game.
Celtic were victorious in the derby but could have played all day at Fir Park and not scored. Trevor Carson and the defenders who prevailed like men throwing themselves on to grenades were partly responsible for that state of affairs.
Endeavour was therefore indivisible from reward for Stevie Clarke and Stephen Robinson. That’s something which surely unites us