HITTING THE I'M ALRIGHT JACKPOT

SITS VAC. WANTED: One leader. POSITION: Saviour of Scottish football.

QUALIFICATIONS: A pair of bollocks (Current occupants of administrative jobs within the game need not apply).

TASK: To merge three dysfunctional organisations populated mainly by dangerous narcissists and empire builders into one that actually works.

Not too much to ask, is it?

That there's SOMEONE out there with the fundamental requirements to take this shambles of a game we have right now and set it straight?

Someone who's not just interested in filling their own grasping hands with as big a slice of the pie as they can?

Who's not just going to protect their own little corner and to hell with everyone else?

Then again, maybe it IS too much to ask.

Because any halfwit who thinks the "I'm Alright Jack, Pull The Ladder Up Championship" is a plan for the future of our game must be so badly deranged they wouldn't have a hope in hell of pulling together a garden fete, let alone our national sport.

It was nauseating to watch last week. I've seen more dignified scrambles at weddings than the performance of the First Division clubs in their bid to jump ship.

And one of the biggest embarrassments of the lot was seeing Falkirk chairman Campbell Christie and managing director George Craig slither up the Hampden steps, minus their spines, to cast their votes with an organisation that shafted them year in year out to set the rest of Scottish football adfrift.

Have they NO moral code?

I've watched my team Falkirk for 33 years.

Seen them in the depths of the old Second Division, seen them part-time, seen them scramble through provisional liquidation.

Seen them in a Cup Final. Looked at the league table with a smile onmy coupon this week seeing them joint top of the pile.

That's football. A journey. Thick and thin. And when it's thin you've got no God-given right to expect anyone to make it thick again.

You just get on with it and cut your cloth. Not now though. Now if you lose money you blame someone else. You blame people for not finding sponsors, not getting you on TV.

Anyone but blame yourself. Anything but take responsibility.

Just listen to Pearse Flynn whingeing last week.

He talks about relegation as if his is the only club that ever suffered it.

He talks about the spectre of part-time football as if it's the plague not a financial reality.

But instead of trying to ride out the first setback his club has had in its history he finds a way of getting someone else to dig him out of the hole.

Then blames those they're leaving behind for not being ambitious enough.

Ambition? Getting yourself into administration with other people's money?

Flynn's just one though. They're all as bad as each other. Not one with the vision to get to the REAL root of the ills of Scottish football.

Not one with the guts to stand up and say "Let's look at the GAME, not just how much of it we can get our hands on."

No-one would argue against restructuring. It's needed.

But when do you ever rebuild something from the top down? Surely you do it from the foundations up if you want it to last?

That's what I mean about making hard decisions. Anyone can make the ones they made last week. The easy ones.

All they have to do is answer the question "What's in it for us?" and they're off.

The hard decision would be to stick around and restructure the WHOLE league for the good of the game. Open up the Third Division, get a proper regional pyramid in place with the juniors and the East of Scotland League and the Highland League.

But they didn't have the stomach or the vision to do it.

Neither did the SPL. But then we already knew that. It's not as if they don't have previous.

All they had to do was ask "How does it affect us?" Not one jot? Fine. They're in.

The hard decision would have been to say "How about two up, two down if we're going to do this right? Take away the safety net. Make it more like every other league in the world.

Aye, right. Like that would ever happen.

And exactly where the hell are the SFA in all this? Where is David Taylor?

When he got his job I honestly thought he could be the man to do it, to bring everyone together.

But the longer it goes on the more Taylor hides behind sub-committees and layer on layer of bureaucracy instead of trying to lead.

He hasn't the guts to be the Henry Kissinger the game needs. The guys at the SPL, Lex Gold and Ian Blair, don't have the principles or the heart to do it either.

Peter Donald at the SFL does have - all the right tools in fact - but probably lacks the desire now with retirement beckoning and the wounds of so many knives in the back still so raw.

But God knows, we need someone before it's too late.

Taken from the Sunday Mail