SFA should call time on comedy club and VAR chuckle brother Crawford Allan can't survive – Keith Jackson

There's a great deal of remedial work needing done around Hampden these days.

From a playing surface which is not even remotely close to being fit for purpose to a refereeing department which is in even worse nick, chief executive Ian Maxwell has his work cut out just trying to keep a straight face while fronting up the SFA’s comedy club. To be fair, Maxwell was honest enough to admit our national game was hurtling towards a VAR crash even before his officials got their hands on the shiny new tech, the operation of which still seems beyond their comprehension. And he wasn’t kidding.

It was probably a source of some considerable relief to the CEO that Crawford Allan and his chuckle brothers weren’t still in charge of the remote control on Saturday when Scotland opened up their latest qualification campaign with a 3-0 win over Cyprus. The chances are, if they had been, John McGinn’s opener would have been wrongly chopped off and Maxwell might still be trying to explain this morning why he handed a new long term contract to manager Steve Clarke before a ball had been kicked in the campaign.

Mercifully, Maxwell was spared from such an uncomfortable post-mortem because McGinn’s goal was cleared by the Croats who were manning the control room and Scotland went on to record an opening win in a Euro campaign for the first time in 17 years.

That substitute Scott McTominay added a bit of gloss with a late double just to seal the deal, was no more than Clarke deserved. Nor Maxwell for that matter. The man at the top of the staircase may not have his troubles to seek but the man he installed as manager is most certainly not one of them. And even though it has been argued that Maxwell didn’t have to tie him down on a new deal which