Downfall of the Scot who really didn't have a clue

POOR Walter Smith, journeyman at the end of his journey. The Springsteen-loving groover of the Ibrox glory days, copyright all major tabloids, has been undone by the management machinations of Goodison. Or something like that.

In reality, a condition that sometimes applies even to football, the unfortunate Smith can be read as an object lesson. He is, for these purposes, a walking symbol of the state of Scottish football, a benchmark for national aspirations.

In this fable, effortless success in Glasgow is of no relevance whatever to life in the English Premiership. Walter, to put it no higher, was out of his league.

The case for the defence is easy to make, of course.

Smith had no money, they will tell you. Everton's ills were obvious long before he even thought of Merseyside. Every acquisition had to be balanced against an asset disposed. By any reasonable yardstick, Walter did well to last as long as he did.

I would like to believe it. Watching the pragmatic Bertie Vogts summon the professionally dead back to life while preparing juveniles for slaughter in the national cause, it is difficult to be too hard on the worthy, competent Smith.

Most managers get their cards, sooner or later. Most have to cope with the serial delusions of directors who understand competence only in theory, if at all. But the point of Walter Smith's failure is that there was never the remotest possibility of success.

So much was evident, in my book, even at Ibrox, when the living was easy.

Rangers fans may look back on the Smith years with a happy nostalgia. The truth is that every successful signing the manager made was more than balanced by an expensive calamity. This was a coach, above all, who identified Scotland's biggest club as a repository for the second-rate, the not-quite-good-enough, the ones who were past their best, or who, even worse, had never made the grade in the first place.

To those who defend Smith, I only ever have two words: Marco and Negri.

Ironically, it ought to have made him ideal for Everton, a club that should have the word "struggling" stitched into the crest.

In theory, Smith was just the man to make bricks from straw. He was not - and did not pretend to be - a Ferguson, a Wenger, a Houllier, or even an O'Leary.

But he was supposed to understand the cattle market. He was supposed to understand limitations. Dull or not, and he was dull enough for a cardigan owners' convention, Smith was expected to bring an unpretentious craft to the grind of Premiership survival.

Instead, he brought Gazza, on the wholly unconvincing grounds that Smith "understood" the sad amateur flautist.

Instead, for reasons never adequately explained, he brought Ginola, a player whose best years - if not his best pay packets - have been behind him for a decade.

Above all, to a team crying out for a pair of strikers, Smith brought, and kept on bringing, defenders. Worse than that, as the final FA Cup humiliation was to prove, he brought to Goodison defenders who could not, in fact, defend.

BUT it was not a hanging offence, not in the real world. Smith is entitled, to take one example, to point to the absurd Glenn Hoddle and ask a few questions about justice.

But any argument over a man so decent - who else nominates their own successor? - must conclude with a simple fact. Walter Smith was the best thing, allegedly, to come out of the Scottish coaching establishment in years and he failed, utterly and completely, with a club who asked for very little.

Failure is relative, of course. Is Martin O'Neill really the Promised One at Parkhead?

Or simply a talented coach who has made the most of his chances in a third-rate league? Is Alex McLeish the next Ferguson or just the biggest fish in the tadpole pond?

And is Smith truly emblematic of Scottish football or just a good man fallen, through no fault of his own, among chancers?

We do not produce an abundance of players, these days, as Bertie Vogts is busy discovering. It also seems, if Smith is anything to go by, that we do not have a generation of coaches ready and waiting.

But what is the real problem, the actual ill?

This, I would suggest: Scottish football no longer produces ideas. No one thinks, thinks properly, about the game. We no longer innovate, imagine or dream.

The cheapest insult you could apply to Walter Smith, and with him Scotland's football establishment, is still the most accurate.

Exposed to the Premiership, he didn't have a clue.

Originality is not expensive; ideas are free.

The salient fact, nevertheless, about the Scottish game is not that it is dull, hold the front page, but that it is bereft of any creative thinking.

Poor Walter Smith, dogged and proud, is the result.

Copyright 2002
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