Players Needed

Date: 12th January 2025

Players Needed

Over the last few years, I have been nothing but astonished at the number of innovative ways in which the Scottish national teams have been created and had great success. The CP team, the rise and rise of the Homeless World Cup are but two examples of football managing to expand out in order to be far more inclusive.

Inclusion, of course, comes not just with wearing a particular type of laces or armband on a special weekend or month, but upon the reality of actually taking your words and placing them in action.

And so, I noted that the European Transplant Football Championship in April has a Scotland team looking for players.

This would be the very first squad of its kind to take their rightful place in Scotland jerseys. There is a Transplant Active Football team, which was established last year, in 2024, because Scotland were the only team of the Home Nations not represented at the World Cup in Italy.

This year, the venue for the championship that we’re looking to be represented at is not quite as salubrious as Italy but is in Oxford.

There’s a fundraising effort to help them get to the tournament.

Founded in Inverness by a heart transplant recipient, Duncan MacAulay, it is another worthy cause to put your shoulder to the wheel for. MacAulay began the campaign due to being surprised that the Scottish nation was not represented at that World Cup.

The winners were Chile, who beat Spain, and finishing third were our old friends and enemies, England.

So, the opportunity for people who have faced such a traumatic ordeal to represent their country is there on the table by April. I would imagine that given we’re close to the middle of January, they’d be looking and be keen to get people through the door and into training as soon as is practically possible, so that they can take on the might and the best down in Oxford.

Though that’s not a return to any football, I have also mused this week on the return or potential return of two giants of the Scottish game.

David Moyes is potentially back in Everton, by the time you read what I have written here, and Kieran Tierney is looking to a return to Celtic, having found life down south in Arsenal and beyond difficult to contemplate and work with.

Moyes, of course, had an astonishing 11-year career or thereabouts at Goodison Park. It would, however, be a move from Goodison Park to their new stadium in the dockland of Liverpool that he would be overseeing, as well as taking on from Sean Dyche the difficult proposition of keeping Everton in the Premier League.

Moyes had recently stated that he didn’t want to be involved in a relegation battle. In essence, that is exactly what he will be going to join. But the allure and the pull of being with a club with which he had so much success and managed to build them into a force within English football looks like it is far too difficult to resist.

There is something about that emotional pull that makes people return to things time and again.

Our own Ryan Stevenson managed to come back to Ayr twice after he’d left the first time, making it three appearances with Ayr. Talismanic is probably how you would describe Stevo in terms of his time with Ayr United, because when he was there, we always appeared to play better, or at least we thought we did. His presence gave us that confidence to believe that the club was going in the right direction.

Just exactly how the Celtic faithful are going to take Kieran Tierney’s return is still to be tested, though the fact that the young man has been down at Arsenal, sidelined by injury, and indeed out of favour with current boss Mikel Arteta is something that they may wish to contemplate. His year-long loan to Real Sociedad seemed to bring limited success, but the limit was placed on it by the fact that Real Sociedad did not sign Tierney and give him a contract.

That would suggest that they saw something in him that perhaps wasn’t quite as stunning and spectacular as they had thought when they’d got him in loan.

Whether or not he comes up north and manages to slot in and become a contributor to the fourth title run in a row is yet to be seen. And certainly the Celtic starting XI don’t seem to have many, if any, gaps to be filled by returning sons of the soil who are going to give their all in the hoops.

But Kieran Tierney is a fantastic player, and Scottish football would be better placed if it attracted him onto the pitch instead of sitting at the sidelines or on a treatment table.

Certainly, the Scottish national team could do with Kieran Tierney back in it to support and help us as we try on our final bid to get to the next major tournament through the playoffs.

That would be, for me, one of the greatest reasons why he should come up the road and indeed slot back into a Premier League side.

But we’ll see whether that happens or not.

It may be that Tierney has lived a high life down south and he doesn’t want to give that up.

Or it may be that we have a returning manager to Everton who is able to get them back up that table over the next 18 months and competing for major honours, including Cups, which is what eluded him in his first stint.

And it may be that come the Home Nations in Oxford that I will be writing about in April, Scotland lifting a trophy as the first Home Nation transplant football team to win one.

Then again, we are Scottish.

Hope, belief, disappointment, reality, sunk…

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Posted in: Latest News

Tags: Scottish footbal, Transfer Window