For club or country?
No thanks.
In the past, I’ve been asked why I don’t care about Scotland matches & international football.
First up, as a Celtic fan, I would be quite happy if our players did not play international football. Some people might read that and think why not ?
The players are tested in a new environment, work with different players, different coaches play in different stadiums and play against different opposition – surely all of that can only broaden their footballing horizons and make them a better player?
From the above paragraph, I have given quite a few good reasons as to why players maybe go off to play for their countries.
Overall, it may help them become a more experienced player but I just think the risks and my lack of having a national team to support outweighs those benefits.
Is that a selfish way to look at it? Probably, but for the reasons that I will give below, I really don’t feel that I have a national team to support, therefore, it’s something I don’t really care about.
First up I will single out the Scottish players. The reasons for not wanting them playing international football is different from non Scottish players.
Like a lot of Celtic fans, I have lived through several instances of the SFA intentionally working against Celtic so my thought is why on earth would I want Celtic players to play for such an organisation?
In my lifetime, I remember the SFA intentionally holding up the registration of Jorge Cadete, this year we’ve had Celtic staff (Neil Lennon) given punishments for something that other people do not get punished for. Ally McCoist got away with his part in the same incident. Craig Brown certainly never got a long suspension for his altercation with Motherwell owner John Boyle.
I, like most, could write thousands of words, if not pages, based on perceived injustices against my club from the SFA (note that I do write my club instead of Celtic as I am certain that other supporters of other teams could do the same thing) but that’s not the point I’m making.
It’s merely to highlight what I feel is a valid reason for me thinking ‘why should Celtic risk our players to play for an organisation that doesn’t do very much to support us’?
One that springs to mind was the John Kennedy incident – now before his injury, I was one of the many who thought that he would have been able to go on and become our main centre half for years. I even went so far as to say that I thought he was future club captain material (the last person I thought that about was Stilian Petrov in his first season and most folk thought I’d lost the plot back then).
Whether or not Kennedy was / wasn’t good enough to go on to be a Celtic great is irrelevant but when I mention John Kennedy, the SFA didn’t seem to be doing very much to help the player or Celtic after his injury.
Yes, it’s only one incident, but I feel that if something similar were to happen, the SFA would just do the same. ‘Thanks for your player but he’s injured and no good to us, have him back’.
I guess the point I’m making is the general attitude towards Celtic & us, the supporters, just makes me think that I couldn’t really care less about the SFA and it’s football team. I do have to say writing that isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
I am a football fan so I want to have a national team to go and support but I feel that the SFA has robbed me of such a thing. I enjoy watching the Euro championships, World Cups etc but it’s just not the same when you have nobody to support in it.
Yes, you can adopt a national team but supporting a team is something that is in your blood, like being a Celtic fan. You don’t just wake up one day and decide that you will become a hoops fan, it’s something that runs through generations of your family & it can’t just be switched on and off.
These are things that make me a Celtic fan, these are the things that make you sit out in the freezing cold weather in the middle of winter to watch your team play (think last winter and some of the home matches).
So on a personal level, there are reasons as to why I have no interest in the Scottish national team but what about other countries.
More so now than any other time in the past, we have players who are from all over the world.
On a typical international break, we could have players going to Asia, middle east, South and Central America plus all over Europe. Each one of them risking injury, tiredness etc.
As I touched on above, I feel it’s quite important to support a team when you are watching football so whether or not the Honduras, for example, do well isn’t something that I particularly care about and the same applies to any other national team.
The other thing is the injury potential – how many times have we had a player come back injured from international football ? Yes, every club with international players can answer that but again, I only support Celtic so don’t care about other teams and their injuries.
Even tiredness these days. Using Cha and Ki as examples, if they have to fly from Glasgow to wherever their connection is to get back to Korea, then train and play football, travel some more then do the reverse journey back, they will tire.
Most football players will no doubt fly first / business class but for anyone who has travelled through a few different time zones over the course of a day or so, it does get tiring.
I know Cha and Ki are only two players from a large squad but the same applies to all of them. Travelling long distances is tiring.
Ok, so now that I have single handedly scrapped international football, I need to go back to the question at the start. What do we do instead? Does anyone know the Braehead centre opening hours?
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