His effort is not in question, nor are his credentials as a former World Cup winner, as a player with West Germany, and European championship winner as a manager with the unified Germany. It is his ability to manage the meagre resources available to Scotland that is the real issue and it is evident that he is not capable of producing a sustained improvement in our fortunes. It may be the eve of a World Cup campaign and it may cost the SFA £ 1m to pay Vogts off, but it is someone else’s turn.
Hungary were supposed to be Slovenia. The dress rehearsal before the real thing. Would Vogts resign if the defeat and performance was repeated in Scotland’s first World Cup qualifier on September 8? “If we play as we did in the first half we will beat Slovenia,” he replied. “I am not a quitter, I told you that before. I stay here and I tell you again in three or four years we will have a very good national team.” He was, of course, telling us two years ago that we would have “a very good national team” by now.
In a sense, the performance against Hungary encapsulated his entire reign. There were moments of cohesion in the first half but then a spectacular collapse in the second after the misfortune of a penalty that was clearly not a penalty being awarded in the final seconds of the first. Echoes of so many false dawns before that have only served to stay his dismissal. The 1-0 victory over Holland at Hampden before the 6-0 slaughter in Amsterdam, for example.
Erratic results are a direct consequence of his erratic management of the national team, which often feeds into our greatest fear: that it means as much to Vogts as a guinea pig does to an obsessed laboratory scientist. Having insisted that Scotland needed the security of a midfield anchor, he removed it (Gary Caldwell) at half-time against Hungary to chase the game and Szabolcs Huszti almost immediately surged into the ensuing space between our defence and midfield to score the decisive second goal for Hungary. “I was looking for a win and maybe I changed that too early,” said Vogts. “We can’t do that and that was a good lesson for me, don’t change too early the system and we need some holding player.”
Then there was the use of Gary Holt. Squeezed out of midfield by Barry Ferguson’s return from injury, the Norwich player was reassigned to right-back on the basis that Archie Gemmill, who scouts for Vogts, had seen him play quite well there for 45 minutes of a pre-season friendly against Coventry. Holt, as honest off the field as he is on it, damningly let slip afterwards that he was not told he would play at right-back until a few hours before kick-off.
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“I’ve got seven caps and I’ve not played in my position once but if you get asked to play a position for your country anyone would take it,” said Holt.
“Sometimes it is not to your benefit but you just try and do it for the team. He said the boy played off the front and he felt a defender could be in there and that’s why he played Gary Caldwell. In the first half I thought it was working well, we were getting a lot of possession and getting at them, then we lost a bad goal and that knocked us off our stride. Maybe in future, as I am getting older and wiser, I’ll just say it is not for me.
“It was only this morning that he named the team, we went through training and that yesterday so we had a fair idea and then he named the team and I still thought I was playing defensive midfield. This afternoon, it was noted that I was playing right-back. It was one of those things. I didn’t have time to moan about it or talk about it.”
Holt is not the first square peg to be pushed into a round hole under Vogts.
Dougie Freedman’s international career was effectively ended by agreeing to play as a right-winger in Vogts’s first match in charge, the 5-0 defeat by France in Paris, yet 30 months on the same problems persist. Vogts’s defence was, like the one he fielded, unconvincing. “I had a report from Archie Gemmill that Gary Holt played very well in this position and Gary Caldwell played very well in the position in front of the defenders against Trinidad.
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My thinking was to use Gary Holt’s experience behind Darren Fletcher.”
The ire that Kenny Miller seemed to express in four-letter form at the technical area after his substitution was in fact aimed at a supporter shouting at him from Hampden’s main stand, claimed Vogts. “Some supporter was shouting to him and he was talking back and I told him to calm down.”
Vogts’s repeated insistence that all was well in the first half was perturbing. Scotland did dominate possession in that period but had precious little to show for it in the way of clearcut scoring opportunities. Most of their shots on goal came from outside the box and Gabor Kiraly, in his baggy jogging bottoms, would have faced the wrath of Lothar Matthäus if he hadn’t fielded them.
Scotland’s structure lacked width, with no natural wide midfielders to provide crosses for the strikers or protection for the full-backs. Hungary, eventually, worked this out and their midfielders poured through the holes in it.
“We’ve tried two or three formations,” said Gary Naysmith, one of the overworked full-backs. “Getting toward the end of the qualifiers we felt we had a set formation that was working for us. We played the same formation as the boys played against Estonia and Trinidad, when we got two wins, so I don’t think we can blame the formation. The fault has got to lie with the players.”
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Perhaps. Or perhaps Estonia and then Trinidad and Tobago were just too poor to exploit the inherent weakness in Scotland’s system.
The Hungarians, although hardly world beaters, as shown by their hesitant start at Hampden, had more pace and skill than Scotland’s previous two opponents. You can be sure that the coaches of Italy, Slovenia, Norway, Belarus and Moldova, our Group Five opponents, will all have taken note of how easily it was exposed by them.
This wasn’t the first disaster for the much-vaunted diamond formation, either.
Scotland lost 4-0 in Wales when Christian Dailly, out for the next four months, was stationed in the position just ahead of the two central defenders in that system. To cling to it, as Vogts will now, as a prescription for success is absurd. It seems merely a way of smuggling a third centre back into the team without attracting the opprobrium Craig Brown used to receive for that tactic, which the former national coach deemed necessary given the paucity of outstanding central defenders available to Scotland.
That dearth continues and has perhaps worsened. Steven Pressley and Andy Webster, a sound pairing for Hearts, looked out of their depth at Hampden, with the third goal particularly calamitous for both centre backs and David Marshall, the debutant goalkeeper. Webster played Peter Simek onside and the Hungarian’s cross was missed by Marshall and then came off Pressley and the keeper’s back en route to the net. “Some of the boys gave me a clear answer, a very clear answer,” said Vogts, when admitting that the nine names he had pencilled in as certain starters against Slovenia had now been reduced. “I know the pressure now from you (the media) and I understand it, I have nothing to defend a 3-0 defeat at home.”
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Vogts may secure a result and stay of execution against Slovenia but the overwhelming evidence is that it will be a temporary fix. A brief respite for him and Scotland before the next disaster. “A couple of times we have made progression and then we seem to take backward steps,” added Naysmith. “We can’t seem to keep it going forward long enough.”