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The role of the hapless Gordon Smith and the impotent SFA in scheduling the, clearly always going to be vital, away trip to Norway for the second week in August taken fully into account, the issue of timing is a mere obfuscation of the real problem: the issue of incompetence. Incompetence is endemic throughout Scottish football, from the players who have little or no ability to perform the basics (such as controlling and passing a football) let alone execute the kind of sublime skills that would make them in demand in the world's top leagues (the EPL, La Liga and Serie A) - the Championship is the dreary summit of our brightest and best's realistic ambitions these days - to our administrators (the SPL, the SFA and the SFL); efficient, progressive, visionary institutions that make the Keystone Cops look like Apple Inc.
Scottish football has been in decline for decades. Supine administrators, short-sighted, self-interested club chairmen and media sycophants allow the Scottish game to be devalued and denigrated by a myopic preoccupation with the Scylla and Charybdis of world football, the Old Firm. In Scotland everything and everyone revolves around the Old Firm, like doomed satellites orbiting a black hole. Many of these hidebound dinosaurs' players and followers barely even want to be Scottish. No nation in the world game suffers such half-hearted commitment to the national team: mock Oirishmen that defect to the Republic, half-hearted Scots (mainly of a red, white and blue persuasion) that call off from international duty on some spurious injury-related pretext or other or retire from the Scottish international team at the earliest opportunity and big time Charlies that think they are patently far too good to suffer the indignity of donning the national shirt.
Both of the Old Firm would, by their own admission, scurry down the drainpipe to the EPL, in the unlikely event of being offered that escape route, quicker than rats deserting the Titanic. They have no loyalty to the Scottish game, so why should we organise our game around them and cast ourselves in the perennial role of hungry orphans squabbling for scraps of food from the Old Firm's table? The SPL, an institution so pernicious and contrary to the principles of meritocracy and natural justice that it would have been more at home in Ceauşescu's Romania, precipitated the decline of Scottish football with it's restrictive practices that forced aspiring members to the point of insolvency by requiring them to build seats they couldn't afford for fans that didn't exist, not to mention it's abject incompetence in chasing the illusory riches promised by a cowboy broadcaster in preference to a more realistic offer from a reputable one, symptomatic of the SPL's wholly delusory perception of the worth of it's sterile product.
The SFL aren't much better, their league structure witlessly aping the SPL's 4 games per season against (and between) the Old Firm template, ostensibly justified by commercial considerations that somehow lose their lustre, not to mention lucre, when the logical outcome of the whole 10 team league system is endless turgid encounters between East Stirling and Elgin (or Queens playing Partick and Dunfermline at least 5 times this season, Morton and Dunfermline 5 times last term and Clyde, Morton and Dundee 5 times the season before that). Ice Station Broadwood, the splendid Shyberry Excelsior (or New Broomfield or whatever it's called this season) and it's scenic environs, Greenock's picturesque charm and East End Park's irresistable delights are now the stuff of nightmares. Locked into a stifling, repetitive cycle, Scottish football is Groundhog Day come to life. I find myself with an ever diminishing appetite for this never changing diet: familiarity breeds apathy. How I yearn for the occasional trip up the coast to Montrose, a wee jaunt down to Annan for a competitive fixture, even a trip to the squalour of Central Park, Cowdenbeath in the cup, anything to break the constant monotony of playing the same teams ad infinitum.
We need a bigger top league, we've been saying it for years, but no-one was listening then and no-one is listening now. We need a pyramid system that rewards ambitious non league clubs such as Spartans (with a progressive youth set-up that puts most league clubs to shame) and gets rid of the detritus that has been clogging up the bottom of the third division for decades. We need two games a season against our league rivals and bigger leagues; it's good enough for England, Italy and Spain, where the football isn't exactly of a bad standard, but not for us apparently. We do things differently in Scotland, as evidenced by our clubs' dismal European performances and our national teams' remarkable ability to get routed by the worst Norway team in a generation.
Scotland lags behind the rest of the developed world in life expectancy and tenaciously clings, limpet-like, to a parochial sectarian "culture" that should have been banished from the national psyche generations ago. The perennial chip on our collective shoulder tells us that it's all England's fault and we console ourselves with their failures almost as much as we rejoice in our infrequent successes. The prospect of England casting off their under-achieving ways under the shrewd managership of Capello while we career from one humiliation to another under the hapless stewardship of George Burley is almost too dismal for us to contemplate. We have to get our own house in order, the days when England even gave us so much as a second thought are gone, we should sever our unhealthy preoccupation with them and focus on changing our game from top to bottom.
Revolution is required. Can we shake off decades of retrograde thinking, the stagnant traditionalism, the stale sectarianism, the reductive worldview, the simplistic short termism and misguided conceptions of self interest that characterise the Scottish game and move forward into a progressive future? Is anyone up to the task?