SPL think-tank's food for thought
unity has just gone up the clique.
The unbelievable decision to ostracise half a dozen managers from the league gang hut was a diplomatic nightmare.
It's as if they had invited Saddam Hussein's legendary spin doctor, , to handle their public relations.
A selection process decided that the working group sweethearts were: Gordon Strachan, Walter Smith, Craig Levein, Jimmy Calderwood, John Hughes and Mark McGhee.
Presumably the process involved using a pin or a game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo.
It certainly wasn't down to say, league positions, since Hearts and Hibs were snubbed.
So surely it wasn't down to nationality?
The Finnish Mixu Paatelainen and the Hungarian Csaba Laszlo are contributing big time to the greater good of the Scottish game.
Surely they are?
And it can't be down to experience.
And Gus MacPherson has achieved the impossible by nailing himself to the Love Street floor for five years - St Mirren being a club that traditionally like to fire their managers into the stratosphere every 10 minutes.
Billy Reid, at Hamilton, and Craig Brewster, at Inverness, are also using the wrong deodorant.
What were they thinking about?
Jim Jefferies and Gus MacPherson are bitter and twisted about the matter and quite right too.
Along with the others who were forced to stick their noses to the Hampden front door like skint weans outside a sweetie shop, they were e-mailed about the matter.
But you can hardly start the revolution by letter - electronic or otherwise.
It's good to talk and at least the SPL recognised the fact. But the chat should have included the dirty dozen.
They are running a football league, not a secret society.
In fact, instead of all of this propelling us forward in the seasonal spirit of peace and goodwill, at least a couple of our top managers have adopted a stuff-this-for-a-game-of-soldiers approach to SPL unity.
Jefferies, for example, only knew about the meeting after his chairman, Michael Johnston, questioned his absence.
MacPherson, meanwhile, only found out about the secret cabal when someone leaked the story on Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland.
"It's strange," he said. "But we're just wee St Mirren and the six are the ones who are valued enough to speak with.
"We have now been told what went on, but unless you are in on a meeting you don't get a feel for it."
Informed by e-mail. It's a nonsense. You can't come to our Christmas party.
But, if you hang about outside, we'll fire a mince pie out the window just to keep you hanging on.
The Kilmarnock manager is treated curiously by the game. He has been a success at Berwick, Falkirk and Hearts, was battered from pillar to post at Bradford, and has produced miracles at Kilmarnock yet was never given a serious mention when the Scotland job was up for grabs.
Right enough, he isn't moving in the right circles.
Get an agent, change your aftershave and start grovelling, James, that's my advice.
If anyone ever wonders what has happened to my hair, the explanation is simple.
I have spent the last 40 years in this business ripping it out in chunks in sheer frustration at the national sport in this country's attempts to move forward as one big happy family.
And now this. A top table for half the managers and an ironing table for the others.
"Tell them who you are and what you are about," they said. To be honest, there are days when I struggle to remember myself. Forty years toiling at the coalface of football journalism does that to you. But I have reason to believe that I have reached the heady heights of the title of Football Correspondent of Â鶹Éç Scotland which gives me a renown, in Scottish terms, of somewhere between Alex Salmond and the deep fried Mars Bar.
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