Gordon Strachan

[aaid]

16 minutes ago, King Of Paisley said:

Think the problem is that we are far too insular in terms of our coaching fraternity and can't look any further than coaches who were part of the Largs mafia. We had a glorious opportunity to appoint Lagerback who was apparently desperate to become manager when we got shot of Burley. Suspect he wanted too much of a say in starting from scratch from a grassroots point of view and the SFA in typical fashion wanted a yes man.

Result?  - Iceland, thanks to Lagerback and an eager association willing to back his judgement, are in their first major finals with a crop of emerging stars coming through their youth ranks. We got the utter car crash that was Levein.

The rest as they say, is history......................

That's an interesting point especially given the success that Lagerback's subsequently had with Iceland.

However, your argument falls down when you consider that Burley's replacement was Levein who was pretty vocal when he was appointed about being involved in all aspects of the national team, particularly in restructuring youth development - how successful he was in that is another question but he made it clear he wouldn't have taken the job otherwise.

Also given that he'd previously taken the SFA to court over a fine, I don't think you can describe him as an SFA Yes man.

 

[scotlad]

1 hour ago, aaid said:

That's an interesting point especially given the success that Lagerback's subsequently had with Iceland.

However, your argument falls down when you consider that Burley's replacement was Levein who was pretty vocal when he was appointed about being involved in all aspects of the national team, particularly in restructuring youth development - how successful he was in that is another question but he made it clear he wouldn't have taken the job otherwise.

Also given that he'd previously taken the SFA to court over a fine, I don't think you can describe him as an SFA Yes man.

 

That's fair comment.  Levein can be accused of many things but being a Yes man isnae one of them.

It does baffle me how he was given such a wide ranging remit by the SFA though.  His three immediate predecessors as manager all had stronger CVs but were granted less power.