When the Scotland football team failed to qualify for last summer’s World Cup Finals – the latest in a series of inglorious, epic fails for the national side – their manager, Gordon Strachan, came up with an excuse that displayed a level of imagination and creativity his players couldn’t emulate on the field.
Strachan summed up his team’s failure to emerge from a group containing Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania and the mighty Malta (with a population of less than 440,000, the latter probably has more Sicilian shrews on its archipelago than people), in a single word: “genetics”.
Cast aside the widely held belief that Scotsmen are broad, brawny, caber-tossing leviathans, Strachan seemed to suggest, and instead compare their height and musculature to, for example, the hearty stew and porridge-eating Slovenians who bullied them off the park in the crucial final qualifying group game.
Facts, unfortunately, do not bear out Strachan’s hypothesis, and he was widely pilloried in the media for his feeble attempt to clutch at straw-coloured excuses, perhaps to deflect from his ineptitude as a coach.
I can’t help wondering if the coaches of Asian teams may not be tempted to grasp this particular nettle in their explanations as to why an Asian nation has never won the World Cup, and sadly, possibly never will.
Of the 20 World Cup Finals to date, 11 have been won by teams from Europe, and nine by teams from South America. Asia’s best performance to date was when South Korea reached the final four back in 2002, when the national team was carried along by a wave of fanatical home support and a fair amount of lactic acid-inducing derring-do. The Duracell bunny would have taken early voluntary retirement.
Beating powerhouses Italy and Spain along the way seemed to suggest shifting sands in the global football landscape and a promising dawn for the world’s most populous continent. It’s fair to say that the sun didn’t quite rise.