“Just call me Berti McVogts,” said the cheery, diminutive German as he was unveiled as the new head coach of Scotland back on a cold January day in 2002. During his turbulent two-and-a-half-year spell in charge of the national side, other names may have been used.
Scotland travelling to the European Championships in Germany, and to face Germany in the opening game of the tournament, no less, has inevitably led to explorations of the connections between the two countries, and the reopening of some old wounds. One seeping, gaping wound, in particular.
Back in the early 2000s, with the Craig Brown era having petered out with failure to qualify for the 2002 World Cup, the Scottish FA decided to try something different. You have to hand it to them, the appointment of Vogts certainly was that.
Where do you begin? Vogts was the first Scotland manager to lose all of his first four games, the last being a 2-0 defeat to South Africa in Hong Kong. James ‘Cheeky Boy’ McFadden made his debut in that loss, then missed the flight home. More on him later.
The scrambled draw in the Faroe Islands after being two down at the break? The high of the first leg defeat of The Netherlands in the play-offs for the 2004 European Championships, before the crushing 6-0 humping in Amsterdam? A morale-sapping 4-0 scudding at the hands of Wales that led one newspaper to mock Vogts up on their back page in jungle get-up beneath the caption ‘I’m a Silly Berti, Get Me Out of Here’?
Or the draw in Moldova, perhaps, the game that at least brought the sweet release of his departure? Take your pick from those calamities, or any number of soul-sapping friendly defeats at a quarter-full Hampden along the way.
Ah, but as Vogts himself has often pointed out in the years that have followed as PTSD (Post Teutonic Stress Disorder) has dissipated among the Tartan Army, he did give debuts to McFadden and Darren Fletcher.
You will hear people say when referring to the Vogts era that he handed out caps ‘like confetti’, but I think another metaphor more aptly sums up his approach. If you throw enough excrement at the wall, some of it will inevitably stick. And by God, wee Berti positively ladelled it on.
All-in-all, Vogts handed 40 players their Scotland debuts, and some of the names on the list – with the greatest of respect – would give you the heebie-jeebies.
Remember Robbie Stockdale? How about Warren Cummings? Or Gareth Williams? We even had an Andy Gray up front, who, alas, was a pale imitation of the original. No offence to these lads, but there’s a reason why Scott Dobie became perhaps the most fitting example of rhyming slang in the Scottish lexicon.
No harm to Berti, who came to Scotland with an incredible pedigree as a player and as a coach, and was – no doubt about it – dealt an appalling hand. But it seems in recent years there has been an attempt to polish the giant, well, ‘Scott Dobie’ that was his Scotland reign in a favourable light.
Were you not there? Do you not remember? I was, and I do. It was an affront to football.
The emergence of McFadden and Fletcher aside, the one good thing to come out of it all is the appreciation I and countless thousands of other Scots like me now have for the job that Steve Clarke is doing.
In fairness, Vogts was the last man to even take us to a play-off before Clarke finally broke the two decade-plus cycle of failure that followed his spell in charge. Some homegrown coaches with big reputations have to carry the can for that too, of course.
But the stench of failure, and just how much of a laughing stock the national team became under Vogts, took a long time to shake off. Clearly, I may still have some issues to work through.
Another lasting legacy of the Vogts debacle is that a foreign manager was never again trusted to take the job on, even if he might have been the best available candidate at the time. I doubt Lars Lagerbäck has Berti on his Christmas card list, for example.
It’s rather like saying we shouldn’t hire another ginger that played for Aberdeen just because Gordon Strachan and Alex McLeish couldn’t get us to a major tournament. Which, off the top of my head, might only rule out Duncan Shearer. But you get the point.
All-in-all, the Vogts era was a disaster, with the high point perhaps being when he outed Christian Dailly on live television as the man going crazy off camera and yelling ‘Cheats, f*****g cheats!’ after a defeat to…Germany. Despite what my sadomasochistic editor may think - who I can only assume I have offended in some way - it has not been ‘a good wee bit of fun’ to revisit it.
Vogts was an amiable character. Charming even. There is no doubt he wanted to do his best for Scotland. He knew though, long before the end, that he was fighting a losing battle.
"If I walked on water, my accusers would say it is because I can't swim’,” he famously said.
Under his leadership, Scotland sunk without a trace, and it is only now under Clarke that we are all finally coming up for air.
