Tom English: The week that rocked Scottish football

AND SO the axe has fallen. Barry Ferguson has gone, Allan McGregor has gone, two ex-Scotland players, two soon-to-be-ex-Rangers players, one departing just five caps short of a place in the SFA's Hall of Fame and the other chucked out just one sandwich short of a picnic.

If McGregor, the dim-witted disciple, was the prime example of rank stupidity in this tortured saga then Ferguson was its director, a once decent player who has within his personality a toe-rag quality, contagious to the likes of McGregor and that other great devotee, Kris Boyd.

Ferguson's brattish disdain has caught up with him but this was no two-man play. The cast of characters in this black comedy stretches into other corners of the Scotland dressing room, into the manager's office and down the corridor to where Gordon Smith and George Peat hang out. The president and all the president's men are involved in this. Boozegate and beyond has claimed two victims but there's been severe damage done elsewhere, not just to individuals but institutions.

On Wednesday night in the mixed zone at Hampden a palpably uncomfortable Stephen McManus said it was time that people drew a line under what had happened. "It'll be forgotten about, as it should be," said the stand-in Scotland captain.

McManus has made a few errors of judgment on the field this season but saying this business will slip from the memory is about as wrong a call as he's made in a while, almost as cock-eyed as saying "it should be". It shouldn't. Not when there are so many questions left to be answered.

Thursday morning press conference, Hampden. What George Burley should have said:

"Okay boys, have you got your notebooks out and your tape-recorders switched on because I don't want you want to miss this. Right, here we go. Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor will never play for Scotland again as long as I am manager. On Sunday morning they abused my trust, they abused Steven Pressley when he told them to go to bed, they disrespected their team-mates and worst of all they disregarded every football fan in this country, especially the youngsters who look up to them. They got pissed. They missed training. They stuck two fingers up to the nation on Wednesday night and I'm not having it. It would be weak of me to let this pass. They let their country down. They crossed the line and it's unforgivable."

Thursday morning press conference, Hampden. What George Burley did say:

"It's done, can't reverse it. Got to move on. They've got to look at themselves and make sure it doesn't happen again. It wasn't good. It's been dealt with and now we move on. I'm not looking back. You take it in, you assess it, they're aware of it. You hope they learn their lesson. That's got to be the case. They know they were out of order, they held their hands up.

"Nobody's put two fingers to anything. At the end of the day, I could be sitting like that. I'm not giving judgment on one picture, all I'm judging is the team. They could easily say whatever. You can't say definitely somebody's putting up two fingers."

Friday evening statement: What George Burley said on reflection:

"At that stage (when he said nobody's put up the V-sign] I hadn't really seen any papers or watched the match again. When I did, I realised that we (himself and Smith] needed to speak again. The gestures had clearly made a lot of people very angry. We talked again first thing on Friday morning and it was clear that Gordon, George Peat and myself were in agreement about what needed to be done. It's not a decision that was taken lightly, but the SFA have to set an example to other players."

Amateur hour at the SFA: Do any of them have a clue?

The boozing was done in the early hours of Sunday morning, so when do you suppose Gordon Smith found out about it? Sunday afternoon, probably. Sunday evening at a push. So the chief executive had all day Monday and all day Tuesday to find out what he needed to find out and think about what he was going to say when the press inevitably started banging on his door looking for comment.

On Wednesday evening, before kick-off at Hampden, he started to talk. Burley would have been entitled to a show of support from his chief executive in these difficult hours. Or, if he felt he couldn't offer support, Smith should have broken the habit of a lifetime and said nothing at all. Better make yourself scarce than publicly undermining your manager, which is what he ended up doing.

Incredibly, instead of giving an emphatic endorsement, Smith was non-committal on Burley's handling of the crisis. "He's made a decision. I know exactly why he's done it. He's told me his reasons. I'm going along with that just now but we will analyse things later on...We will decide whether it was the best decision and George knows that."

Thanks for nothing might have been Burley's response.

While Smith was flip-flopping, Scotland beat Iceland. Shortly after 11am on Thursday we sat down with Burley at Hampden. He explained, after a fashion, why he kept Ferguson and McGregor in the squad. He was concerned what dismissing them would have done to the morale of their mates in the team. "I had to do what was best for the squad, to keep them focused," he said. "That was the most important thing. Whatever action you take it has to be right for the squad at that moment in time."

Fearing a moping or even a mutinous group of players, he did the right thing, but not after all manner of prevarication. There was talk of the players being sent home and then not being sent home. It is believed that Burley asked them if they wanted to go home, given the media storm that was about to start crashing around their ears, but this hardly tallies with the story of the senior players going to the manager and telling him that they didn't want Ferguson and McGregor leaving the camp.

This is the way the SFA does its business sometimes. Confusion and contradiction. They make themselves look like the most slapdash organisation this side of RBS. The players stayed because the repercussions of them leaving might have been damaging. Burley couldn't have his team bemoaning absent friends when they should have been tuned into the challenge ahead. He got that bit right.

He thought he got the next bit right, too. The chat with Smith took place on Thursday afternoon after which the chief executive offered his belated support. "We now consider this matter to be closed," was the concluding sentence of Smith's press release.

This, of course, was more nonsense.

Enter George Peat who rode roughshod over his own chief executive when calling for a full report on the controversy just hours after Smith had declared the drama over. His own statement made Smith look like a fool. It made the SFA look like an organisation that doesn't communicate with each other. Smith undermines Burley, then backs him, then gets undermined himself by Peat.

Peat says he wants to bring a report before the SFA's board the following week, then the following day, when news reaches Hampden of Rangers' swingeing punishment of their errant players, the SFA hurriedly decides that Ferguson and McGregor are banned for life.

There is still no comment from the manager on his departed duo. All he has said so far about any of this is a statement of the obvious. "It's not ideal. They knew they were completely out of order. What you do is you try and trust people. You're talking about experienced players. You can't hold their hand, you've got to have a little bit of trust which, unfortunately, didn't happen. They know they were out of order, they held their hand ups."

They held their hands up right enough. Two fingers in particular. Having been spoken to "angrily" by Burley and been warned to behave themselves by Walter Smith that was their reaction. They are gone now, the pair of them. But the SFA decision-makers remain in place. They are wounded and discredited. Blind men leading the blind.

Too weak, too paranoid: Why George Burley is on borrowed time.

Listening to him talk on Thursday at Hampden you could almost decipher Burley's true meaning. But, as ever, with the Scotland manager you were never quite sure. Burley appeared to be hinting that Ferguson and McGregor would not play for him again. It wasn't that he said it directly, more he implied it when talking up other players in their positions, when dodging a straight question about whether Ferguson would be his captain next time around.

He spoke about his midfield, said he really liked the look of Darren Fletcher and Scott Brown in the middle, said those two could be a long-term partnership, said he had more options as well, Barry Robson, James Morrison, Paul Hartley and others.

From those comments us tea-leaf readers – about 10 of us from Sunday press – came to similar conclusions. Burley wasn't going to pick the Rangers pair again but he wasn't going to publicly announce it either. His hope, we deduced, was that both of them, Ferguson in particular, would soon accept their fate and retire from international football before the next qualifier in August.

This is his essential weakness. He should have destroyed both players on Thursday morning instead of skirting about the edges of the story. He should have shown strong leadership but he was as weak as ditchwater.

Burley intimated that the players were finished on the one hand and then spoke of them learning their lesson and not repeating their mistake on the other. Even off the record he was not prepared to clarify things once and for all. He talks in tongues. Did he feel personally offended by their abuse of his trust? Did he feel they didn't show him and his staff enough regard? Did he not think he should ban them for all-time? There were no proper answers to any of these questions.

Another tack was tried. Gavin Rae coming on to help close down the game in those frantic closing stages. Gavin Rae and not Barry Ferguson. Surely this was Burley making a point to his former captain? "I wasn't making a point, I was just making a judgment on the team," he said. But Ferguson never even warmed-up. There can't have been an intention in Burley's mind to use him on the night? "Yeah, he was on the bench. If we felt it was right..."

Assuming fitness and form would Ferguson be his captain for the next qualifier? "I don't know," he replied. "I've got to look at the situation. The team did very well last night, some excellent performances, but every game is different."

If you've spent any time listening to Burley that response is tantamount to a "no, he won't be my captain again" but he wouldn't say it and now somebody else has said it for him and Burley looks weak and indecisive and forgiving of players who have now been shunted out of his squad for good.

Burley, you sense, is a nice fella but he needs to discover his inner Souness and fast. A bit of badness is essential in his job. He seems incapable of it. He's a strange type of manager. He's clearly brave and adventurous in his team selections but he's paranoid when it comes to explaining his thought processes when the subject is a little controversial. There were sound reasons for keeping Ferguson and McGregor in the squad after Sunday – team harmony and the pursuit of as relaxed an environment around the players as possible under the circumstances – but on Thursday he was free of all that. He should have been liberated and he should have got out his big axe and chopped down some dead wood in his squad.

If he's going to survive he needs to do two things. First of all, make the play-offs. Second of all, stop being so limp. He may yet do the former but the latter is going to be harder. When Rangers suspended the two players and made it pretty clear that they have no intention of playing them again they showed up Burley and the SFA. It should not have been Walter Smith and Martin Bain who set the agenda on Friday, it should have been Burley and Gordon Smith. And they should have done it 24 hours earlier.

But their heads were too busy spinning. There was a lot of dizziness in this story, a lot of blurred vision, from the drunken players in the bar of the Cameron House, to the Scotland manager, to the chief executive and president. In this week of slapstick, they all had their part to play.