Leadership is lacking so badly at our hallowed sporting institutions

Let us deal with home matters first. The departure of Stewart Regan is something I predicted when he ran out of luck and Michael O’Neill decided not to become manager of Scotland. The knives were out for Regan within the SFA even before that because no matter what good he did, and he did a lot of good things in his term of office, he failed to convince the public or most club officials that he was the man to lead Scottish football into a new era. He was tainted by the Rangers administration and tax saga. He was so far wrong with his insistence that the SFA had to consider moving from Hampden that he should have lost his job over that alone – remember it has been dragging on for well over two years – and anyone who thinks the other clubs were going to let Celtic and Rangers or the Scottish Rugby Union profit by moving away from Hampden clearly does not have their finger on the pulse of Scottish football, which is a prerequisite for the job of chief executive of the SFA. Organising the ludicrous tour of central and South America at the summer was his final error, and Celtic chief executive Peter Lawwell – the real most important man in Scottish football – will have to soothe a lot of feathers now, with the Celtic players and management adamant that they cannot go on tour and still do their best in the Champions League qualifiers which, lest anyone forget, would be worth a goodly sum to the other Premiership clubs if Celtic make it to the group stages.

Regan had his supporters within the SFA and clearly their judgement must now be questioned. Perhaps those who wanted to retain him in the face of all the evidence that he was a busted flush should now be considering their positions, though the blazers in sport rarely do so.

In no way is this a Little Scotlander point but I do think the job should now go to someone who is Scottish, who knows the game, and who has been successful in at least running one club, and who has a vision that everyone in the game here – the clubs, fans, the media, sponsors – can buy into. That is why Leann Dempster of Hibernian should get the job.

The same goes for the person who becomes Scotland manager. Regan going means the SFA has has the chance to put a new team in place at the head of Scottish football and the blazers should start out with a simple criterion – get a manager and chief executive that can work together to achieve the thing the fans want above all, which is to get Scotland to the European Championships in 2020.

The Scottish Rugby Union administrators had nothing to do with the failure of the national team to at least match Wales on Saturday – that was down to individual errors and poor tactics by the coach who clearly decided kicking for territory was the way to beat Wales when all that did was give the men in red the ball to punish Scotland. The Murrayfield executives should be aware, however, that further failure by the team will upset many people in the clubs who are already looking askance at several SRU plans, and they will quite rightly begin to ask what is all this stuff about when our XV gets stuffed?

My personal jury is out on that one as rugby is a sport where fortunes can change swiftly, and let’s hope they do before the weekend.

This jury has already made its verdict on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and that is that they are guilty of incompetence, arrogance and hypocrisy on a breathtaking scale.

To fail to convince the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) that 28 Russian drugs cheats should keep their lifetime bans was just plain incompetence and for the IOC to then moan about that verdict is both hypocrisy and arrogance in the extreme, because which sporting body was the main instigator of the CAS? Why that would be the IOC, then. This is what IOC boss Thomas Bach said of the CAS verdict: “We feel this decision shows the urgent need for reforms in the internal structure of CAS.

“CAS has to change its structure in a way that it can ensure that it can better manage the quality and consistency of its jurisdiction.”

In other words, start giving verdicts we like or you are all out of a job. The reason why that is extremely hypocritical is because the IOC itself varies its approach as it suits itself. Rather than confront the truth that drugs cheating in Russia is a state-sponsored and state-managed activity and therefore all connected with Russian sport should be expelled, the IOC has placated Vladimir Putin by allowing so-called clean athletes to compete under a neutral banner, a banner so neutral that everybody knows they are from Russia, a country that cheats. The IOC and every other sporting governing body should have banned Russia from competing for at least five years and introduced genuinely independent examiners of Russian sport.

That would have meant taking the World Cup away from Russia, however, and too many founders of the IOC and FIFA have already laid out their cash, so expediency triumphs over morality yet again. A plague on all their houses.