Burley, trying to tame the boneheads

So says disgraced/fired/useless ex-Scotland manager George Burley’s nephew, Craig Burley. And who are we to argue?

According to Craig, the reason George’s tenure was disastrous and awful was all the players’ fault, and not just the fact that they couldn’t stop themselves from drinking and flipping the bird on the sidelines.

Poor George was simply light years ahead of Scottish men in terms of his complex, intricate strategies and tactics that he tried to impart upon those feckless players under his command. Which begs the question: which of these Burley boys is most delusional?

Take it away, journeyman midfielder: “I don’t think what he wanted to do got across to some players and also I think some of them are too thick to take it on board – and not good enough to take it on board, anyway, to be perfectly honest with you.”

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the players simply didn’t care to play for George any more — that 3-0 defeat at Welsh hands was the epitome of “phoned in” if you took the 90 minutes out of your precious life to witness the carnage. It had nothing to do with some nuanced formations (they seem glued in a slow-mo 4-4-2, for what it’s worth) or over-elaborate play; it was merely a team administering their own last rites in a meaningless game smack-dab in the middle of the domestic season.

That said, maybe there’s a grain of truth in Craig’s hyperbole: when you consider that George tried 52 different players during his reign o’er the Scottish NT and still couldn’t stumble upon a half-decent starting XI, we must wonder what went wrong. You know, besides losing all the time.