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We're giving this one 45 mins ???

How about the Scottish Government? We need to start being serious about the health of our nation, and that starts with promoting sport and fitness properly. The benefits for our young people and the savings for our health service would be imeasurable.

I totally agree with you on this Ya bezzer and I read a thread at weekend that highlighted the amount of scottish players playing in spfl and also now our championship and the figures were horrendous. I whinge about our lack of scots in team but we were top of pile nearly with an average of 5 players a game starting along with another 4 teams. Then another 4 with 4ish each and glasgow 2 and aberdeen with 2ish each a game. That is a downright disgrace in my eyes and highlights maybe a lack of talent within Scotland but certainly a thought process with management that lower level english players are better which is of course not usually the case as we have seen. The catastrophic state of youth development as you state is again a huge topic and again I would agree with you having been involved and seeing it through my own eyes. I do honestly feel it is simple to improve by getting more participation in schools. It is no coincidence that most of our recent successes within national team (patterson,gilmour,hickey etc ) went to performance schools and so were playing football everyday of their lives growing up at their school. Boys do not play up the park like they did 20/30/40 years ago and for a lot the only football they play is organised at boys clubs with their mums and dads watching on and in a lot of cases shouting and screaming at them. Some boys cant play because of costs involved some drop out because the coach favours their own or their pals own etc etc and they only play /train for a few hours a week. If every school had a dedicated coach for all the school teams in the country (roughly 300 schools) and was implementing similar to what goes on at performance schools then it seems quite simple that we would have a bigger pool of players in this country that would filter into every level of football. Football whether us older ones like to admit or not does not have the same pull as years gone by so I feel that we need to encourage it more and we have a captive audience at schools so this is way to go. The joy that football can bring to a country is unrivalled as can be seen with the scenes from Argentina in last day and the performance schools and rangers and celtic in effect having their own schools helps but there is so much more we can do