SFA had no choice in Olympics row

Few should really be surprised that, at the end of quite an almighty fuss, football’s Team GB at the 2012 Olympics will consist of just English players, with no Scots, Northern Irish or Welsh taking part.
It has been quite a political rammy, all this, with the SFA, like the Welsh FA and the Irish FA, beginning to feel like an endangered species during the debate. And all because Gordon Brown wanted the Scots to play their “British” card for the sake of the London Olympics.
The facts remained pretty clear. The SFA may have looked insular and parochial in their desire not to take part, but they had good reason for their cold pragmatism. There is resentment across the 200-strong Fifa family of nations over the otherwise paltry SFA’s influence at international football’s top table, and it would take any excuse to have them wiping Scottish football’s governing body off the map. A Team GB at the Olympics would have been just such an excuse.
The resentful nations in parts of Europe, Africa and CONCACAF ask this: how come a singular, sovereign state like the United Kingdom gets to wear four different hats in world football? And how come they get to boss the rest of us around on the International Football Association Board (IFAB), where the FA, the SFA, the WAF and IFA have a vote each, while the rest of Fifa — the other 200 nations — rotate the remaining four votes among them?
You can see from this it is not a democracy. And you can see also why the SFA has had to tread extremely carefully over Team GB.
The calls yesterday for the head of Gordon Smith, chief executive of the SFA, over the whole debacle, sounded absurd. The SNP MSP, Christine Grahame, who chairs the Scottish Parliament’s health and sport committee, and who has hollered for Smith’s head, evidently doesn’t know what she is talking about.
Smith has no hang-ups one way or another about Scottish footballers playing for a Team GB in the Olympics. Indeed, personally, he might even fancy the idea. But other Scots who have walked the corridors of power in football — David Will at Fifa and David Taylor, presently at Uefa — have both warned him and the SFA about such a deal. They have both said that the SFA would be compromised on the world stage.
Taylor, indeed, went so far as to tell the SFA: “Don’t touch it with a barge pole.” Is Smith really supposed to ignore such advice from someone who is in touch with the international politics of football every day of his life?
It is a great pity, and it looks bad, but has the SFA had any other choice in this matter?
Source:The times