LIFE does not necessarily mean life. Everyone is familiar, for example, with the standard format which follows a conviction: the accused, we are told, has been given a life sentence – which should be a minimum of 20 years.
What goes on in the serious arena of the High Court also holds true in the trivial world of football. Apparently stern sentences can, in the fullness of time, be commuted.
Contract negotiations which are proclaimed one night to have broken down be
yond repair are miraculously up and motoring the next morning. Supposedly serious fall-outs turn out to have nothing like the half-life originally predicted. And foolish, self-indulgent footballers who are cast into the wilderness by club or country often find that their life bans turn out to be mere temporary exclusions.
That's the reality. A more clement climate can breeze in. Circumstances and personnel change and the banished bounce back.
Everyone knows it. You, me, Scotland manager George Burley, Scottish Football Association chief executive Gordon Smith.
But everyone also knows, or at least should do, that events have to take their course. Everyone – you, me, George Burley, Gordon Smith – is aware of the parts that various actors play, and of the supporting roles that also have to be filled.
In the case of Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor, Burley and his employers agreed the Rangers pair should be banned from playing for Scotland as a result of their early-morning drinking session in the team hotel and their subsequent behaviour. And once that course of action had been agreed, the manager could rightly expect the SFA to continue to back him.
Instead, following Thursday's meeting of the SFA board – a meeting which was supposed to conclude the whole issue – Smith failed to make an unambiguous statement.
In doing so, he also failed to give Burley complete and unequivocal backing, and undermined the credibility of the supposedly stringent sentences passed down by the SFA.
The statement issued in Smith's name included the following sentence: "The board fully supports and understands the manager's decision." But when he addressed the media at Hampden immediately after the board meeting, Smith was unable to say anything so clear and concise.
Asked if he could state that Ferguson and McGregor would never play for Scotland again, Smith equivocated. "That is something that will have to be looked at in the future," he said. "The statement that came out on Friday was quite clear: at the moment they will not be chosen."
In fact, the statement from the SFA eight days ago regarding the ban on Ferguson and McGregor did not include the phrase "at the moment" or any similar wording. Instead, it said that the players would "no longer be considered for international selection by Scotland".
No longer. Everyone knows what that means, and repeating those two easy words was well within the capability of Smith.
But for some reason, he chose not to repeat them. In doing so, he clouded an issue which should by this time have become a model of clarity.
Smith is not a stupid man. Quite the reverse, in fact. And at times, perhaps, he feels the urge to exercise his intellect a little too strongly.
That would have been fine, on Thursday afternoon, if he had been invited to philosophise about the whole issue of apparently decisive judgments turning out, in the fullness of time, to be altogether more lenient. But he was not.
He was asked instead to repeat the policy of his own association, to assert that Ferguson and McGregor were indeed banned indefinitely. But he could not.
As a result, some of those in attendance at the national stadium – and later some of the Scotland supporters who read or heard their reports – were able to infer that what Smith meant was that the ban on the two would only remain in place for as long as Burley was manager.
That life only meant however long the incumbent holds on to his post.
Which means that instead of clearing up the situation, Smith has increased the pressure on Burley and given ammunition to those who want the manager out. It is less than ideal behaviour on the part of the chief executive, who needs to learn the virtues of speaking briefly and unambiguously.
