CRAIG GORDON should have been Scotland’s keeper at last year’s Euros.
Now, 18 months on, he MUST be our man between the sticks as the country’s World Cup dreams hang in the balance.
It seems ridiculous to write this about a guy who will be 43 years old on Hogmanay, and who, by the time we run out in Piraeus on Saturday night, won’t have played a competitive game in 196 days.
There’s no question it’s a damning indictment of our nation’s talent pool that we’re left scrambling around for a last line at such a crucial time.
It’s where we find ourselves, however. It’s where Steve Clarke warned the SFA a long time ago that we were headed.
But how and why we got here is an argument for another day.
All that matters right now is handing the right guy the gloves for a double-header with Greece and Denmark which will decide whether or not we go to the finals next summer automatically.
We can select Scott Bain, with 15 games under his belt at Falkirk this season, after being picked just eight times in the past four years with Celtic.
We can plump for Liam Kelly, who has played once for Rangers this campaign, and 14 in all since signing on to warm their bench in the summer of 2024.
Or we can take what could be the biggest gamble of all by putting our faith in Gordon.
The Hearts keeper, who has been kept out by a shoulder injury since May, was considered not good enough by Clarke to take to Germany when he was in good health and on top form.
For me, that was a massive mistake on the manager’s part — and he simply can’t afford to get it wrong again this week.
We all saw what happened on a horrendous Hampden night back in June when Angus Gunn got crocked taking his first catch against Iceland.
We had to throw on hapless Cieran Slicker, who had played three games for Ipswich in the previous 22 months, because Kilmarnock journeyman Robby McCrorie had injured himself in the warm-up.
Now, we’re there again, seeing as Gunn has wrenched a knee in training. Except, of course, that Iceland was a friendly, while the stakes could barely be higher for the upcoming double-header.
The one bonus ball about these games, of course, is that whatever happens we’ll still be in the World Cup, that we’ve already done enough to earn a play-off place come March.
Trouble is, come March we’ll still be in the same goalkeeping schtuck as we are today.
We’ll still be crossing our fingers that not only is Gunn getting minutes at Nottingham Forest, but that he doesn’t pick up another injury in what’s now a catalogue of knocks at real crucial times.
If he’s not around, then we’ll be in deep trouble. Well, unless the Blazers scour the world to find someone as tall as a basketball star, as agile as a cat, whose granny can be traced back to Auchtermuchty, and who somehow hasn’t played competitively for the country of their birth.
If they don’t, then we’ll be back to playing eeny-meeny-miney-mo with Gordon, Bain, Kelly, maybe Jon McCracken at Dundee and… er, that’s it.
Our current Under-21 goalie is Liam McFarlane, fifth choice at Hearts, farmed out to Alloa.
His stand-in is Ruaridh Adams, third choice at Dundee United and currently cutting his teeth on loan at East Fife.
Fact is, Scotland simply isn’t producing first-choice, first-class keepers any more.
Ten of our 12 Premiership clubs have imports in the nets — a Dane, three Englishmen, a Frenchman, a Pole, an Austrian, a German, a Ukrainian and a Bulgarian.
That’s why Gordon is such a national treasure. Not only is he very talented, but his self-belief and inner strength have kept him coming back.
He’s had to recover from two broken arms, a cruciate op and a broken leg, as well as each fresh disappointment as glove rivals have threatened his career with club or country.
Last summer, after being paraded in the farewell friendly against Finland then left out for the fixtures that mattered, no one would have been surprised if he waited until the Euros were over then announce a dignified international retirement.
Gordon would have bowed out as one of only seven guys to earn 70 Scotland caps, as someone whose international career spanned an all-time record 20 years.
He’d have been remembered for his penalty save in Moldova that sealed a play-off for the last World Cup, and as someone so committed to the cause that he played in a Nations League win over Ireland 12 hours after being at the birth of his fourth child.
Yet back he came to keep vital clean sheets against Portugal and Croatia as we got our heads up and believed once more.
Gordon passed David Weir as the oldest man to wear the jersey and became one of only five to win 80 caps.
He’s a special footballer, someone Jambos gaffer Derek McInnes rightly held up the other day as the man best placed to handle the goalkeeping crisis Clarke finds himself in.
For me, that’s a no-brainer. But you know the biggest reason why I’d choose him?
When the bullets are flying against the Greeks and the Danes, no one is more likely than Gordon to pull off the kind of point-blank save that makes our eyes pop and our jaws drop.
That one save could mean the world to Scotland. That’s why, if he’s fit, he HAS to play.
Because, let’s be honest here, if Gordon isn’t fully fit, why is he even there?
VAR was sold to us on the promise of eradicating clear and obvious refereeing errors.
Three years and loose change later, the new buzzphrase is that it enforces “factual overturns”.
Truth is, though, neither cuts much ice any more with increasingly fed-up managers, players and fans.
Look at the goal St Mirren has disallowed early on in Saturday’s 3-0 home defeat to Hibs.
The eventual decision was one of those “factual overturns” because scorer Marcus Fraser was apparently a nose-hair ahead of the ball when Keanu Baccus crossed it.
But look at the replays. Look at the stills. Look at the frame where they’ve drawn in the lines.
Can anyone really swear Fraser’s offside? Or are the VAR guys still guessing as much as the rest of us?
For me, it’s the latter – because as with countless other incidents over these past few years where games have turned on the whim of someone miles away from the action, if it takes as long as it did here to come a decision, there’s nothing factual about it.
Yet omehow, they can’t look at Auston Trusty clearly kicking Jack Butland in the head and decide that, factually, it should be a red card.
To me, these two instances – one we could debate all night, the other agreed on by everyone outside the SFA – sum up the whole muddled way Scottish football has implemented VAR.
A system which was meant to make the game simpler and fairer, but which is slowly but surely doing the exact opposite.
CELTIC players surely must still wake up in a cold sweat about THAT defeat at Dundee.
Sure, anyone can lose to anyone on any given day if all the stars align.
But even then, when you put that 2-0 win for Steven Pressley’s strugglers into context against their other recent results, it genuinely does beggar belief.
Battered 4-0 at Pittodrie.
Thumped 4-0 at Tynecastle.
Now, swept aside 3-0 by Rangers.
Plopped in amongst that chaos, how the champions conspired to capitulate to a team with only one other win to their name all season will remain one of life’s great mysteries.
And as they set about clawing back the gap Hearts have opened up across the first quarter of the campaign, they’d better pray it doesn’t come back to haunt them big time.
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