In 1996 the Euros only consisted of 16 teams. The previous tournament saw Scotland, strictly speaking, reach the last eight. But tonight it's about reaching the second stage of a major tournament, and just changing the fucking record. And, no, I'm not talking about "We're on the March with Ally's Army".
My particular favourite is fellow Scots mocking my belief that Scotland can win games like tonight’s. It’s not that they’re forgetting all the times we have won the hard games – France home and away in the Euro 2008 qualifiers, the republic of Ireland at Parkhead eight years later. It’s that they’re assuming I’ve forgotten all the times we came disastrously, painfully short. As if. That’s what I was born into.
The first big summer tournament I remember is Argentina 78. I remember the
final and the odd second round game. But I vividly recall all the Scotland
games. My keenest memory is not the all-time low of the Peru opener or the
dashed high of the closing game with the Netherlands. Rather it’s being sat at
the coffee table in front of the telly fashioning a pennant from paper, felt
tip pen and Sellotape, declaring Scotland the Greatest Team in the Universe,
just as Iraj Danaeifard scored in the Cordoba stadium later named after
tournament Golden Boot Mario Kempes and my dad confirmed that this time an
Iranian player had scored for Iran… rather than for my country.
And here we are again, 43 years later; two games into the group, a point on the
board but me sat in a different Scottish living room and Scotland not needing
to beat the last World Cup runners-up by three clear goals – but still needing to
beat them. As I sit cobbling together more delusional crap – this time on a
laptop to be posted on a blog no-one will read rather than on paper my gran and
a few aunties will feel obliged to admire hanging on my bedroom wall – Wullie
Johnston hasn’t been sent home for using banned substances, but Billy Gilmour
is isolating after a positive test for Covid-19.
Where you come from infects where you are now.
Forty three years before Argentina 78 Scotland would still have solid claims to
be, whenever we beat England, the greatest international side in the universe.
Argentina had recently lost the first World Cup final to Uruguay. On our
continent Italy and Austria were putting together serious claims to domination.
Yet the Wembley Wizards’ 5-1 triumph felt as recent then as Scotland’s lauded
West Germany 74 campaign was to my first World Cup memories. So the temptation
towards arrogance was as rich in the Scotland support of the late 1930s as the
temptation towards abasing self-mockery is now.
Both mind-sets were/are equally inaccurate.
Long before Covid shut the stadiums, people were scared to invest in the Scotland
national team, emotionally or financially, because they think they’d become
part of the Tartan Army’s ongoing self-parody. But that perma-stag-do,
here-for-the-beer delusion is merely a corollary of a country too scared to
demand anything of the sport it’s obsessed with. The genuine frustration of 1974,
when Scotland became the first team ever to exit a World Cup finals without
losing a game, should indeed have been tempered by a belief we’d do even better
in 1978.
The West Germany campaign was a great starting point to rebuild a national side
who hadn’t been to a finals since the 1950s. But the fear of heroic failure –
the worry that Culloden, Flodden and the Darien scheme were national traits
rather than historical events – led to a compensating over-confidence about the
Argentine World Cup. Disaster there ensured optimism was outlawed in Scotland
by the time, later that same year, Jock Stein took over the national team, from
our latter day Charles Edward Stuart, Ally MacLeod.
The Scottish national motto is basically “Don’t come the big man with me, pal” and MacLeod had committed the worst sin of all - making us think we were the big man. The downside to being a famed toppler of bullies is you don’t know how to bully. Thus we went out of World Cup after World Cup because we couldn’t quite put away Zaire, Iran, New Zealand or Costa Rica. Thus the Tartan Army – once a terroriser of away venues in the same way we forget Barcelona were once the most thuggish team in Europe – developed a perverse form of “winning” suited to a support where belief and hope were again synonymous with arrogance and hubris: we took the piss out of ourselves before anyone else could. We defused losing.
This isn’t about party politics. Football, for me, is the only place where
nationalism is acceptable. And it should indeed be a sense of football
community rather than any kind of grandstanding. I detest the SNP but I’m a
unionist in denotation rather than connotation. I’m about unity rather than
division. I’m old Labour. Watching
Scotland now is a thoroughly middle class endeavour, where working class humour
has been objectified, bastardised, patronised and adopted like a trope rather
than felt as a reality. Much like the kilt.
Yeah, I believe there are ways in which Scotland could be more independent but “committing
financial suicide” isn’t one of them. Yet I attend Scotland home games and I
see little or no SNP propaganda. To be honest, I see little or no collective
identity outside the wearing of the kilt and no sense of common purpose past a
general, lazy unhappiness with the team losing. Mostly, long before Covid, I
see endless empty seats.
There’s a feeling Rangers fans are detested by the Tartan Army. The Rangers
support used to be the Tartan Army. The Rangers support knows about winning and
success, however. There’s only so much acceptance of international failure they
could take before our own problems – and our own problems with the SFA – left
the national team free to be the big club of everyone else who wasn’t regularly
part of a big support.
Some of them celebrated hating Rangers because there was fuck-all else to
cheer. I was always safe in the knowledge I loved the Scotland national team
far more than they ever had.
Scotland start winning, the Scotland support I grew up with returns. It’s right
that so many families go to Scotland games now. It’s wrong that they see it as
some sort of training exercise for the real thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I share the fear mind-set. I’m Scottish. It’s instinct. It’s where I was born – it’s what I am. For example, I knew the only way we’d get something from Wembley on Friday was if there was a setback in the Czech game last Monday. Now, after the 0-0 with England, we go into a game on a bit of a high which is always dangerous for us. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m pleased Billy Gilmour has been ruled out. Manager Steve Clarke might have wanted to drop him anyway. Young players – star debutants in particular - don’t always put together the runs of sensational performances Gilmour would need to if he was to repeat tonight what he did on Friday.
Callum McGregor and John McGinn were bloody sensational in that midfield on Friday and I hope they were irked by Gilmour getting all the credit. In that perverse way Scots only get results from adversity, I hope they’ll relish the opportunity to prove they were laying the groundwork for this moment long before Gilmour came into the side to collect a Covid-riddled Man of the Match trophy from Heineken.
But I’m done with the fear. I’m more than done with the acceptance of failure. I’m beginning to feel a contempt for the people who can be bothered telling us we’ll likely take the lead tonight then concede in the last minute – “because, you know, that’s just what Scotland are like” – yet they haven’t found the energy to buy a ticket for a Scotland game at any point in the last 23 years of singularly inglorious failure. Not heroic failure – just failure failure.
I don’t want to go all Roland Barthes (mostly because I can’t) but the minute you start saying “That’s just the way things are” you’re buying into a mythology and you’re happy for things to continue that way. If you care change it. Don’t worry, uur national humour and our humility are never going to be lost. We’ve got a library of Billy Connolly LPs and centuries of deprivation and chemical self-abuse to ensure that. But the acceptance, the romanticising of failure, has to stop. I knew this two years and three days ago as I found myself crying on the same sofa, in front of the same telly on which I’ll watch tonight’s game.
I wasn’t crying for myself. I was crying for a group of the bravest women I’ve ever seen representing our country, being struck down with what can only be described as our national infection. Tears of pride as Scotland went 3-0 up on Argentina, of all teams, in the 75th minute of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, in Paris, the birthplace of truly international competitions, of all places. They weren’t just on the cusp of breaking the Scottish Second Round curse, they were doing it with a grace and elan which I could feel healing the international portion of our national sport. Scotland’s women were crushing Argentina at the Parc des Princes which, if you know about Racing Club de Paris and Stade de Reims and… oh, look, it was just amazing.
And then it was 3-1, and then it was 3-2 in the 94th minute and when Argentina were awarded their penalty I did something I never do for my men’s teams when they chuck it; I cried. I usually only shed football tears through joy. But this time I bloody cried because I was still a tourist to the women’s game and this just wasn’t fucking fair and I felt like it was my fault for allowing the particular Scotland team I supported every bloody year to infect the beautiful thing the women were putting together in …
What? Sexist, you say? I’m patronising the ladies? Okay well what the fuck was it when I did likewise during the 2015 Rugby World Cup? The men’s IRB World Cup, when Scotland took the lead against Australia at Twickenham with 5 minutes left and I immediately began sobbing because I knew they’d have it taken away from them – the totally winnable semi-final with Argentina and the chance to reach their first ever World Cup final. Why did I start crying with projected heartbreak for a bunch of lawyers and private school boys who could snap me like a twig if they so desired? It wasn’t patronising. It was the sheer grinding, soul-sucking, fucking inevitability of Scottish teams losing tragically in field sports invented by England in which we were the world’s first foreigners.
This has to stop. We can’t care this much and remain this incapable of true success. That’s just depression. And they say depression is anger turned inwards. Let’s get fucking angry. Outwards. Starting with Croatia – beginning with the Sahovnica in Mount Florida this evening.
It should be no surprise Billy Gilmour is able to boss a top international game like he did on Friday. He has a Champions League winners medal. He comes from the same town in which I sat at that coffee table Sellotaping together my big pennant. We have Andy Robertson who has a Champions League winners medal and, even more impressive these days, an English Premier League winners medal.
Villarreal’s Étienne Capoue got the official UEFA award after the last Europa League final but Scott McTominay was Manchester United’s Man of the match; never a bad thing. Kieran Tierney is borderline world class and, frankly, Scotland is the home of international football – the first international was played in Glasgow - and most European crowd records and is the only nation to provide a finalist in all three European club competitions but never make it past the second round of a major international finals and… and… and our population talks about nothing other than football.
We need to be angry. If we fail tonight we don’t blame these players. They performed miracles to get us here. But we need to ensure we build on the fact we’re back in tournaments. We need to feel outrage at our historic failure on that front.
Steve Clarke played for the same club Gilmour plays for, the current European champions, and made a career in Scotland beating the big boys – holding his own with the Old Firm as boss of a Kilmarnock side bottom of the table when he took over. He’s from Saltcoats, the town next door to my home town of 1978, my mum’s home town. Yes, my mum knows Steve Clarke’s mum. Is this the problem? Nah.
There are plenty reason for our failure at international level. But population, as Croatia demonstrate better than most, as Uruguay always demonstrated and as Wales are shoving down our throats these days, is not one of them. What there is no excuse for is a failure to expect and demand more than a piss-up and a moan whenever we go to watch the Scotland national team. I’m sick of it.
I tried to convince myself I would be satisfied with seeing
Scotland in a major finals. I did that last Monday. It wasn’t enough. I can’t
help myself. Even if I tried not to care, I just do – it’s in my genes… and I
always wear jeans, never a kilt – because that’s how it was when I was a lad in
1978. And I’m the same lad tonight, hoping we turn it round, 43 years later, on
a night when being “sent home” is exactly what we want.
In 1872 we hosted the world’s first international match. A 0-0 with England - sound
familiar? After that we became the best on the (admittedly much smaller)
football planet. It’s taken one and a half centuries but here we are hosting
the biggest tournament in Europe and the next game we want to be involved in,
in the Last 16 of Euro 2020, in 2021, could well be at Hampden. This is already
different. After 23 years away from our routine of qualification then first
round knockout, everything has already changed. And that change must be
embraced.
Dare to feel it – dare to go with it. Dare to fucking believe.
