Comment: Decisive action needed to end Levein era

Published on Thursday 18 October 2012 00:00

CRAIG Levein and his Scotland players were transported to and from their World Cup qualifying double header in Wales and Belgium by a charter flight company called Small Planet Airlines.

By the time they touched down at Glasgow Airport in the early hours of yesterday morning, the gulf between them and the planet’s leading international football teams had seldom felt bigger.

Levein’s claim of progress achieved since he became Scotland manager in December 2009 has appeared spurious for some time. After a start to the 2014 World Cup campaign which sees Scotland anchored to the bottom of Group A with just two points from four games, his vision of positive momentum is simply preposterous.

The onus now falls on SFA chief executive Stewart Regan and his fellow office bearers to act decisively and terminate a managerial tenure now as pitiful as any in the national team’s history.

With the remaining six World Cup qualifiers effectively reduced in status to preparatory games for the bid to reach the 2016 European Championship, the opportunity can be seized to give Levein’s successor a significant amount of time to revitalise a stagnant Scotland team.

No-one should reasonably be judging Levein’s competence on the evidence of Tuesday night’s 2-0 defeat in Belgium alone. Losing to opponents who increasingly look to have genuine greatness on the international stage within their grasp was no surprise and certainly not a disgrace in any sense.

Levein, though, must be assessed on the desperate situation Scotland found themselves in as they walked out into the King Baudouin Stadium. The damage sustained in dropping four points at home in the opening September double-header against Serbia and Macedonia, then surrendering a winning position against Wales in Cardiff last Friday night, left Levein’s player under disproportionate pressure to achieve a positive and unlikely result in Brussels.

As Regan admitted yesterday, the scheduling of fixtures in Group A negotiated by the SFA had led to expectations that Levein should be able to earn sufficient points from the first three games to compensate for a predictable loss in Belgium.

Instead, Scotland have proved just as feckless as they were in the deeply underwhelming Euro 2012 qualifying campaign when they finished a tame third in a five-team group behind Spain and Czech Republic. But for a 97th minute goal from Stephen McManus which secured a 2-1 win over Liechtenstein at Hampden, Levein would have been responsible for the worst result in Scotland’s international history during that campaign.

As it was, that excruciating occasion remains one of only three qualifying victories he has overseen in 12 attempts – the other two also by single-goal margins against Liechtenstein away from home and Lithuania at Hampden.

Like any manager, Levein has had his share of hard luck stories to bemoan, but even on the occasions during his tenure when he has most keenly felt he has been dealt an injustice by officials – most notably in the 2-2 draw at home to Czech Republic in September 2011 and then last Friday’s 2-1 reversal in Wales – Scotland’s own limitations were just as significant to the final outcome.

Levein has consistently talked up the standard of players he has at his disposal, raising expectations among supporters. Yet he has been unable to extract the maximum from them in terms of collective performance levels.

In reality, the quality of the current Scotland squad is not as stellar as Levein would often have us believe. While many of the players now operate in the English Premier League, only captain Darren Fletcher does so with one of the elite clubs. On a technical level, Scotland continue to have considerable deficiencies, as the poor standard of their ball retention in recent matches has underlined.

That reflects a wider problem, of course, one which can hopefully be addressed in years to come by the performance strategy programme being overseen at the SFA by Levein-approved appointment Mark Wotte.

That programme must be put aside as the Scotland manager has to be judged on the more immediate demands of getting the best out of the current national team. Whatever limitations there are among the present crop of players, Levein has palpably failed on that front.

He has used 58 players in his 24 matches in charge and perhaps the biggest single reason for the beleaguered position he now finds himself in is that Steven Fletcher has only appeared in three of those fixtures.

Levein’s two-year Mexican stand-off with the man who is now regarded as one of the most accomplished strikers in the English Premier League was an act of self-defeating folly which will surely come to define his time as Scotland manager, along with the risible 4-6-0 formation deployed against Czech Republic in Prague which prompted Fletcher’s initial discontent.

Of course, the Sunderland striker would not have provided a cure-all for Scotland’s ills over the past two years, but it is reasonable to assume his consistent availability would have effected some degree of improvement.

His recall in the current campaign was welcome, but simply too late. Levein will continue to rue the errant decision to disallow Fletcher’s “goal” in Cardiff which would have made it 2-0 to Scotland. Most others will see Fletcher’s absence from the blunt performances against Serbia and Macedonia at Hampden the previous month as more significant.

It is, however, the views of Regan, SFA president Campbell Ogilvie, vice-president Alan McRae and second vice-president Rod Petrie which matter most of all now. If they do not reach the conclusion that Levein’s time as manager is up, they will be condoning the dismal mediocrity of the national team under his charge. Even at a time when Scotland’s place in world football is generally so painfully diminished, they have a duty to aim higher than that.

Taken from the Scotsman