Brattish players leave George Burley's job hanging by thread

By Roddy Forsyth

He indulged Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor by allowing them to stay up in the early hours of Sunday morning last week – and then they overindulged on drink.

It may serve saints well to try to see the best in everyone, but it is a near-suicidal trait in a football manager. So it is all the more incredible that Burley was still trying to protect Ferguson and McGregor late on Thursday morning. His initial defence of them almost left him too exposed to survive in the role.

The Rangers pair had already stabbed their manager in the back by embarking on an eight-hour drinking bout in full view of shocked fellow guests at Scotland's training base on the team's return from the World Cup qualifier in Amsterdam. But, having been warned to be on their best behaviour by both Burley and Walter Smith – the Rangers manager telephoned the two players and read them the riot act – they then made V-signs and middle-finger gestures at photographers and TV cameras as they sat in the technical area before Wednesday's qualifier against Iceland.

Smith, sitting in the stand behind, was incandescent at their behaviour. The language he used to describe the pair at half-time cannot even be hinted at in a Sunday newspaper. Burley, of course, had weightier matters on his mind, being engaged in trying to keep Scotland on course for a play-off place.

However, by the following morning, the furore generated by the cretinous actions of his captain and goalkeeper was raging across the country. Even as he sat down with the press men at Hampden, the SFA switchboard in the building was being bombarded by outraged complainers.

Burley wanted to accentuate the positives of the previous evening, especially the performances of Darren Fletcher, Ross McCormack and Alan Hutton, but his demeanour became increasingly agitated when, eventually, the chat turned to the behaviour of Ferguson and McGregor.

Asked about the derogatory gestures made by the pair at Hampden, Burley tried to change the subject and, when presented with newspaper front pages graphically highlighting the players' actions, he said: "Nobody is giving two fingers to anything. You cannot say definitely that somebody has got two fingers up or whatever. The trouble is we are speculating again.''

Nor would Burley be drawn further on his view, expressed on TV after the game, that 'everything is fine with Barry'. Others within Hampden Park, though, realised they had to deal with a bushfire of protest that could flare out of control if they chose to do nothing.

George Peat, president of the SFA and Gordon Smith, the chief executive, were already feeling the heat, but an important consideration was the timing of any action. The SFA, with no contractual obligations to the players, could act as it pleased, but they had to allow for the possibility that if the culprits were thrown out of the Scotland set-up before any club sanctions were imposed, others players would walk out, enfeebling the squad.

Rangers resolved that dilemma on Friday by suspending Ferguson and McGregor from training for two weeks and fining them. Within minutes, the SFA announced that they would never play for Scotland again – news the pair heard on their car radios as they left Rangers' Murray Park.

On Saturday night Burley offered this explanation of his behaviour on Thursday: "At that stage, I hadn't really seen any papers or watched the match again. When I did, I realised that we needed to speak again. The gestures had clearly made a lot of people very angry."

An SFA insider told Telegraph Sport: "George's instinct is to protect his players. He always tries to give them the benefit of the doubt." But he may have gone too far this time. The damage may already be done.

Taken from telegraph.co.uk