BEFORE the inevitable World Cup post-mortems and excuses start can we please accept one premise? We cannot have our cake and eat it.
As a nation somewhere in the middle of the second division of the international rugby scene, we bemoan the fact that this is largely due to our footballing pedigree and trot out the well rehearsed platitudes about New Zealand's 200,000 rugby players against Scotland's 20,000.
So that makes us a footballing nation then. My admittedly ancient gazetteer has the population of Norway as 4.5m, Denmark as 5.1m, and Croatia as 4.6m. They are all going into the next round of the World Cup so there's no hiding place for us in terms of population size either.
The simple fact of the matter, which is continually suppressed by columns of media hype, is that we are extremely poor, possessing neither speed nor skill, and no amount of excellent coaching or physical stamina is going to overcome these deficiencies.
When our largest and most successful football club puts out its team at the start of the season there will be how many Scottish players in it? Sorry, can you run that number past me again?
It may be that here is something deep in the Scots psyche which precludes excellence in team sports, which leaves us grateful for individual Scottish stars such as McRae, Montgomerie, Corsie, Hendry and Coulthard.
You may gather from the above that I find a rather hollow ring in Alex Salmond's pathetic soundbite that the team ''have made all of Scotland very proud.'' Do we really want someone whose aspirations fall so short of our own to lead a devolved Scotland?
A Trombala,
Halcyen, Alexander Drive,
Bridge of Allan. June 24.
IT is a pity that your news coverage of the failure of the Scottish team to reach the next round of the World Cup was in terms of language and general presentation highly redolent of the kind of imminence of Armageddon hysteria being purveyed by many of the tabloids, particularly since your editorial offered some brief but wiser words.
As you rightly say in the editorial our performance ''was not good enough'', although there was no serious attempt to ask why. The first thing that must be taken into account was the size of the countries we were playing in terms of population. Brazil has a population of 157 million, Morocco 13 million, and only Norway with 4.4 million has less than Scotland.
For two of our opponents the reservoir of potential talent was much greater than was available to us, and for those who already look ahead to the World Cup of 2002 it is well worth reflecting that one experienced football commentator has suggested that it is only a matter of time before there will be a Scottish Premier League game without even one native-born Scot on the field. Should this trend continue we are unlikely to have the talent to even qualify for the next World Cup.
Small nations can succeed on the international scene nevertheless and we only have to look at how New Zealand with only 3.5 million people dominates international rugby.
Norway has taken drastic steps to improve its overall athletic successes by forming an organisation called the ''Olympiatoppen'' which is allocated 58 million Norwegian kroner per annum. The successes of such initiatives can be partially measured in terms of what Norway did to Brazil on Tuesday evening.
Both Norway and New Zealand are independent nation states with control over their own resources, and neither do their athletes have the enormous emotional and psychological burden of attempting to prove that their nation actually still exists every time they compete.
The Scottish Sports Minister, Sam Galbraith, has said that there will now be a ''sports co-ordinator'' in every school. We will see whether this amounts to anything other than giving one of the existing PE staff a fancy name and telling him or her to get on with it.
At the end of the day I am reluctantly glad that we lost to Morocco. Had the score been the other way round and we had learned six minutes from time what had happened at the other game our news reporters would doubtless have succeeded in persuading us that even the Deity was against us.
Alan Clayton,
1 Mid Letters, Strachur, Argyll.
June 24.
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