A wing back still needs to be able to defend.
SPL wasa good league in the 80s and 90s. Early to mid 80s you had Aberdeen and Dundee United either winning or in major european finals. Way football back then was of course with Forest winning european cups and teams coming up and challenging to win the league like Watford.
In the 90s lots of good players were at old firm. Gazza, Brian Laurdrup, Stefan Klos, Van Bronkenhurst, Henrik Larsson, Chris Sutton, guys that won the CL and were big players for their national team.
Money tap was turned off soon after and now we have situation where Celtic barely play in CL anymore and Rangers the other season were knocked out of europa by Luxembourg part timers. I don’t think a team below old firm has made the Europa league group stages since Aberdeen in 2007-08. Since then TWO league of Ireland teams have down that, St Pats Athletic and Dundalk.
I’ve always respected Scotland for the players and managers they’ve produced. Even now you have a champions league winner from Liverpool captaining them tonight but their whole league system has been on the decline now for 10-15 years.
They probably did overachieve generally in the 70s right through to the late 90s but the inequality that now exists at the top level in football has left them out.
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From the early days of the professional game Scotland produced a veritable conveyer belt of talent right up until fairly recently where it has turned into a dribble.
Glasgow was the undisputed centre of the football universe a century ago. I think I’m right in saying that as the 19th century turned into the 20th the three biggest football grounds in the world were in Glasgow. In the 60’s Celtic won the European cup with a team consisting of players all from the Glasgow area. And right up until the 1990’s most of the best sides in England had a Scottish spine. Even at our place we’ve had a ton of Scottish talent pass through.
Such a shame that the masses of Scottish talent never did itself justice at a major international tournament.
All of that talent began with Scottish league clubs and so the quality up there was undoubtedly European competitive for decades.
Something went wrong in the late 80’s. The Souness revolution at Rangers where the talent started flowing the other way fuelled by our European ban maybe acted as the first barrier to local talent. Maybe the early 90’s cash injection into England meant English clubs went shopping globally rather than nipping north so the dreams of becoming the next Dalglish, Bremner or Mackay became more remote. Maybe Scots kids, like English kids stopped seeing playing football as the universal pastime and took up more sedentary activity.
Who knows? But the Scots punched so far above their weight for the best part of a century and their league reflected that. But that seems well and truly like history now. A shame. I used to love Bob Wilson introducing some very brief Scottish highlights at the end of match of the day.
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Wish him all the best nice guy but awful defensively better in a 3-5-2 when he can get forward more but you still need to be able to defend a bit in that formation and like Leahy he was never really good enough to do that.
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The fall of the Berlin wall & the fragmentation of the Soviet Union has also had a big impact upon the competitiveness of Scottish football. Where there was once only Yugoslavia, for example, there’s now Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, etc. It could be argued that prior to this Scotland occupied a false position in the hierarchy of world football.
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Sorry. Not sorry. A for attitude, but a C at charitable best for ability based on my limited viewings.
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Seemed to love playing for our club and always gave 100% (unlike so many of that awful squad). I think he will be missed more than we think, at least with him in the team we appeared to have at least some degree of passion, particularly in the very rare, occasional attack.
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I’ve got passion, give me a contract?
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Me too, although I’m 66 I’m still good in goal at 5 a side, but that does not make me a pro footballer, you have to realise how really good you have to be at football when you think back to school and Sunday/Saturday footy, how many who looked worldbeaters actually make it into pro football!
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My point is you can have all the passion in the world, if you ain’t good enough you ain’t good enough. Unfortunately, as much as I liked him, he wasn’t good enough over 2 seasons. Whilst the step down to League two may have suited him, I can’t help but feel relieved that the god awful Whitney defence is now gone. Absolutely no excuses now.
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I’m guessing he was probably offered a league 2 contract as a gesture of good will…
We will replaced with Better.
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I came to a very similar conclusion a while back, in that Souness arriving at Rangers to buck the Celtic trend, coinciding with English clubs being banned from Europe, permanently stunted the development of Scottish players. Wherein half the Scotland squad had previously played in the English top flight, that situation was quickly reversed, with Wilkins, Steven, Stevens, Walters, Hateley and the like, all heading north for European football. Celtic were reduced to bringing in you Dzewinowskis and similar in an effort to keep up, leading to Rangers grossly overspending to do the same when Larsson et al turned the tide back.
By this time, the English situation had resolved itself, and where previously Strachan, McAllister, McInally, and Hansen were moving south, Amoruso, Reyna, and DiCanio were now the players making that move, and the Old Firm would bring in more overseas players to diminishing returns (Nacho Novo, Michael Mols, Marco Negri etc), in order to not lose ground on the other, as the flow of gems from St Mirren, Partick Thistle and the like to the big clubs had been stemmed when everyone was going north, and comparatively few were going the other way.
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As recently do Iceland, a country with a population roughly equivalent to the UK’s homeless figures.
Sounds awfully familiar
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Good for him that he gets to work somewhere closer to home, but I’m not fussed at all that he’s left. We’re trying to build a squad that will give us automatic promotion this year and based on his performances for the past two years, he’s nowhere near that.
Seems like the Livingston manager thinks he’s got a no-nonsense defender according to the Pie & Bovril forum. Best of luck with that.
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Nicky Devlin could probably play in their top division too.
One of the most enjoyable books about football I’ve read was about Scottish football.
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As I said on another thread, some players had their futures sorted months ago , Devlin being one of them.
He was part of the worst back four in my time watching the Saddlers. How he managed to play so many games with such consistent poor defensive performances I will never understand.
Good riddance.
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When a top flight Scottish Club signs the likes of Devlin on a 2 year deal, derision is easily come by.
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