It is not an understatement to suggest that something narrative changing happened yesterday. In fact minus the hyperbole, that is exactly what happened. Being Scottish my association with national team sports has for a long time now been a familiar one. On the rare occasion we’re not being outclassed by some developing nation with a population of Glasgow and a budget of Dundee, we manage to rediscover the heroic fires of William Wallace, shock the biggest teams to find ourselves on the cusp of victory before a moment of inexplicable ill-fortune results in us falling at the last hurdle. Yes we’ll call it ill-fortune. We are Scotland and we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is an understanding built up through experience. We have James McFadden’s screamer in Paris followed by defeat to Georgia. We have William Wallace. We have 1707. We are the master’s of glorious failure, it seems a fatalistic inevitability.
Last night though we changed the narrative. Despite conceding a last minute equaliser against Serbia we somehow did the most un-Scottish of things by holding on and winning on penalties. We may have only qualified for a tournament but for us it was like we had won it, we had won qualification. After twenty-three years of false promise, this was a victory. Winning in a penalty shootout was dramatic too, this is actually becoming a very Scottish thing as we’re now two for two. We’ll be playing the English at the tournament and in the perfect world we would just scrap the game and have a shootout instead. Being Scottish though I’ll resist looking forward to that game with too much excitement. We may have changed the narrative yesterday but mental conditioning goes deep.
This will be our first tournament since the World Cup in 1998. I remember it too, I’ll never forget Tom Boyd’s own goal against the Brazilians when we were playing so well. I’ll also never forget, or forgive, Gary McAllister for that penalty miss two years earlier. Football can be harsh, supporters harsher, let’s hope tournament football can be a little less so for us for once. All of my national footballing memories in between have been qualifiers. The majority painful. I’m not going to pretend I watched them all either, I’m not dedicated enough to watch us draw in Moldova or lose in Lithuania. Now though twenty-three years after the last time, my summer will be taken up with supporting one team and not just whoever’s playing the English. It’s time to leave Moldova behind, learn the words to the second verse of the national anthem and look forward to tournament football. What a rare pleasure it’s going to be, cautious pleasure of course.
Observations and Misunderstandings 