At least Scotland’s women know how to play football | Kevin McKenna

In Scotland, the failure of our international squad to qualify for major football tournaments is as inevitable as death and taxes. A 2-2 draw in Slovenia last October saw Scotland maintain its exceptional record of successfully avoiding the final stages of global competitions. When the World Cup commences in Russia this summer, 20 years will have elapsed since Scotland last competed at the business end of a serious football tournament. An entire generation of Scots now dreams about the World Cup as the Israelites once dreamt of the promised land.

Our international millionaire footballers are adept at discovering new ways of body-swerving World Cups and European Championships. Last year, Scotland took it to the wire and were actually less than 90 minutes away from qualifying for Russia 2018 when they took an early lead in Slovenia. That goal was scored by Leigh Griffiths, the nation’s most deadly finisher.

Inexplicably though, the Scotland manager chose to omit Griffiths from the crucial early games of the qualifying stage. Thus a fresh way had been discovered to ensure non-qualification. Previous attempts at qualifying had foundered on traditional Scottish failings such as tactical ineptitude, managerial favouritism, rank incompetence and our eternal absence of basic skills. Now we were courageously defying the international footballing convention that dictates you always field your best striker.

While our men’s team slipped out of the side door of international football, it was left to our women’s team to remind the nation what a Scottish XI looks like in the final stages of a major tournament. No full-time, professional women’s player exists in Scotland, yet our international team overcame that handicap to qualify for the women’s European Championships that took place in Holland.

Although they failed to get much further, they gave a decent account of themselves against nations where well-paid professional women’s football has been established for decades. It was a triumph just to get there. And if recent results by our women’s team are an indication, it looks like they are improving all the time. Scotland’s women ended their European Championship campaign with an excellent 1-0 win over Spain and have opened their World Cup group with two wins out of two.

This is a watershed moment for women’s football in Scotland. A lot of hard work, heroic levels of dedication and thousands of unpaid hours have brought women’s football in Scotland to this stage. Scotland as a nation must now decide if it is serious about backing the development of women’s football. In many other countries, notably England, Germany, Scandinavia and the US, professional women’s football is well established and fully supported by the authorities that administer the game in these countries. In Scotland, though, despite the emergence of a well-organised league structure, the attitudes of the almost entirely all-male Scottish Football Association and our senior professional clubs remain unenlightened.

In this they are reverting to the traditional Scottish male football authorities’ attitudes to women’s football. Women began playing organised football in Scotland to a high standard in the late 19th century and one of the first recorded women’s internationals took place between Scotland and England in 1881. During the First World War, crowds of up to 50,000 watched women’s football before the SFA ordered a clampdown and outlawed it. A few clubs sought permission to host women’s games but were forbidden to.

As the decades passed and other countries began to acknowledge the wide participation of women and girls in football, Uefa, the game’s governing body in Europe, moved to bring women’s football into the fold. In 1971, 31 countries voted to endorse this. Only one nation voted against it: Scotland.

That women’s football in Scotland is currently in a state of good health is in spite of Scotland’s medieval attitude towards it. And lest anyone think that the SFA was fostering the men’s game throughout this time, think again.

Between 1930 and 1954, the governing body kept Scotland out of the World Cup, a period during which we were producing some of the planet’s finest players. In those early years, Scotland would have had an outstanding chance of winning the trophy. That’s what happens, though, when you permit a bewhiskered assortment of village bowling club presidents and masonic lodge devotees to run your national sport. If the SFA and our most senior clubs, many of whom are happy to take money from their many female followers, are serious about developing women’s football in Scotland they must act as though they mean it.

Last week, the chair of Scottish Women’s Football, Vivienne MacLaren, expressed a degree of optimism. “My dream is that in three years the SWPL is at least semi-professional, if not professional,” she said. Scotland’s top clubs are required to fulfil a number of obligations if they want to be members of the elite Scottish Premier League. Among these are all-seater stadiums and heated pitches as well as being financially solvent. The SFA should demand that these clubs employ a set number of full-time women’s professionals as players and coaches to meet the demand of the increasing number of girls seeking to play football.

BBC Scotland could help here too. It is struggling to produce original content for the launch of its digital stations later this year. Its coverage of men’s football on radio and television is a national joke. A weekly magazine programme devoted to women’s football and footage of the top matches would inject some much-needed originality into its tired and predictable schedules. The sports desks of our national newspapers could also take the game seriously by sending their main football writers to some of these games and to include interviews with players and managers.

Women’s football is free of the sectarianism, violence and drinking culture long associated with men’s football. When the SFA is scrabbling about for sponsors, it ought to be pointing this out and encouraging its commercial partners to support women’s football. Scotland has a chance to achieve excellence in international women’s football, but does it have the balls to support it properly?