Craig Levein comes out of the dressing room to be interviewed by the BBC. His team, the Scottish National team, the oldest international football team in the World, have just been beaten by the Czech Republic. Not just beaten, but humiliated. The scoreline was, at the first glance, a respectable 1-0 loss. But it was the manner of the loss that was humiliating. The Scottish team of 1872 lined up and in an attacking 3-0-7 formation. The Scottish team of 2010 lined up and played a pathetic 4-6-0 formation. Levein had decided the best tactic was to play with precisely 0 strikers. It was more than that, the Scotland manager had decided it was imperative that Scotland not attack at all.
In his BBC interview which followed he admitted disappointment with the result, but admitted his team were playing for a 0-0 draw. He carefully but forcefully defended his tactics. He is also showed he clearly has no idea what he's doing. The best Scottish managers of the past have been carefully pragmatic. In recent years Walter Smith showed how to get results with careful, controlled defending and counter-attacking play. Levein probably thinks he is continuing this tradition. Unfortunately he has forgotten about the "counter-attacking" part. Levein doesn't seem to realise that a key method of defending your goal is to, on occasion, have possession of the ball. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if the opposition don't have the ball, they can't score. And it also doesn't require an advanced PhD in Football Tactics to say that when you have the ball, trying to attack the opposition goal is a good idea.
Alas for Levein he's stubborn enough to not learn this lesson in one game. Even more unfortunately for Levein the greatest international football team in the world are in town tonight. It's not hyperbole to say that the current Spain team are one of the best teams ever to have existed - especially when you consider the core of the team also play for Barcelona, one of the greatest club teams ever to have played. Levein has hinted that he has a gameplan to deal with the tricky Spaniards - with their funny ideas like "possession" and "attack" and "goals". Knowing him this plan probably involves sticking ten men of the goal line and having a keeper try to punt the ball away. Which in actual fact would suit Spain down to a T. The only games Spain have struggled in have been games where the opposition defends high and tries to hit them on the break. Levein will have seen this and probably decided the "hitting them on the break" is an unnecessary distraction from all that defending they will have to do.
Obviously Levein isn't entirely to blame. The SFA have been continually idiotic and spineless in dealing with the rotten domestic game. All clubs have seriously underinvested in younger players - the Old Firm because, screw it, they'll buy up everyone else's; everyone else because, screw it, the Old Firm will just buy them up anyway. This of course leads to tonight's laughable situation where 40-year old Davie Weir is going to have to mark David Villa, probably the best pure striker in the World today. Their has been talk of the Spaniards being "intimidated" by the Scottish home support. A laughable claim considering almost all of them will have played in front of 80,000 hostile Madrileños or 90,000 agressive Catalans. I think they're used to it by now. Similarly kicking them up in the air won't help, since Real Madrid and Barcelona players get this treatment anyway.
But ultimately Levein is proving himself to be far out of his depth, even with the modest ambitions the SFA have. He claims to have been hired to ensure Scotland qualify for the Euro 2012 championship. He has not explained how not even trying to win away from home will help this cause.
UPDATE (Post-game): Well, that wasn't actually too bad. But surely coming so very close to taking the European and World champions to the sword adds further fuel to the debate in what the bloody hell Levein was thinking in the Czech Republic. I mean if you can spirit up an almost winning performance against Spain, why would you need to defend at all costs against a Czech team who are not up to snuff?
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