IN seeking to do the right thing, Walter Smith must accept he could have given the wrong impression. The Rangers manager has exiled Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor from his squad because he deemed their V-sign gestures on the Scotland bench the other night "not right".
Embarrassing to his club, Smith deemed them personally unacceptable since he expressly told the pair to ensure their behaviour was beyond reproach amid the fall-out from their all-night boozing session at Cameron House Hotel following the defeat in t
he Netherlands.
Smith draws a clear distinction between the drinking and the digit brandishing. It was the latter, and that alone, that led to him suspending Ferguson and McGregor for a fortnight and docking them two weeks' pay. Many, however, will see the ending of the two players' Ibrox careers as an outcome long in the brewing as a consequence of Smith failing to tackle the drink culture his predecessor Paul le Guen was lamenting all of two-and-a-half years ago.
"I honestly haven't found a problem here," Smith countered at Murray Park on Friday. "I ask them to be professional and in my two years I have never had to act during a Rangers trip. I'm not missing anything. We do regular fitness checks. I hope the other night doesn't make people think its a regular thing, although nobody could be blamed for that with the manner of what happened the other night."
A perception exists that Rangers players have traditionally used alcohol as the glue in team bonding sessions precisely because former charges of Smith have. Nine-in-a-row-winning captain Richard Gough's Ibrox epitaph became "the team that drinks together wins together" but the Rangers manager dismisses such sloganeering as mythologising.
"They wouldn't have won nine-in-a-row if they'd done all the things they said they did. If they were doing that, what were the rest of them doing at that period of time. I don't think that was a proper reflection of them."
And Smith is at pains to stress it is no reflection of lifestyle choices made by the current squad. "(Drinking] doesn't happen to the same extent, players are more aware of their responsibilities, which makes the Sunday morning thing more disappointing," he says. "The work they do on their fitness and diet is terrific – including the lads in our place that were involved. They work hard, they all do these days.
"They've all got more responsibility for that side of it, which makes it disappointing they portrayed that image when they were there (at the Scotland team hotel]. I don't think it was there before."
At Rangers' training ground the other day the appearance of Madjid Bougherra in front of the press was enough to jolt those in attendance from an obsession with hardly outrageous errors of judgment on the parts of Ferguson and McGregor.
The Algerian internationalist was in Rwanda with his national team for a World Cup encounter as football on the African continent was providing a genuinely shameful news story after last weekend's crush at Ivory Coast's qualifier against Malawi for next year's South African finals left 22 dead and a further 132 injured. Tragically, Bougherra could not express surprise over the third major loss of life at an international football game in his home continent across the past year alone.
"In Africa there is a problem because football is so big in the head of the people and all the time in the stadiums they have more and more people," the defender said. "When we play in Algeria there are always more people than there should be because people love the game, but sometimes have no money and little else. We need to be more careful."
In Scotland we could do with being careful about the tones we employ in reporting mishaps of the most trivial kind. But we won't be.
The full article contains 664 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
