A chance to up our game as a no-soccer sanctuary
IT’S supposed to bring us together for four weeks every four years, but the World Cup is actually a pretty acrimonious event.
For a start, not everyone is happy that Russia is hosting. Also, a lot of us grudge the demand on public attention, and the space the event takes up in newspapers, shop displays and television schedules.
World Cup abstainers fall into three broad categories: those who are oblivious, those who are indifferent, and those who are downright irritated by the world turning football-shaped.
If you happen to fall in the last two categories, this tournament is an unwelcome flood of ballkicking in what is traditionally one of only two months without goalposts.
You can’t escape footie fever by heading off to the Med, or backpacking through Australia. Even Iceland is taking part.
So if you are looking for a place where the 2018 World Cup scarcely matters to national pride, you should probably stay in Scotland.
This seems less a national tragedy and more of an opportunity.
What about all those other people who hate the World Cup? The non-fans who baulk at the prospect of a month indoors on the sofa, shouting at the telly with potato snacks in their hair.
They are a restless, mobile tribe with money to burn if the right kind of sanctuary can be found.
FOR the next four weeks, Scotland could be that refuge. A land where you don’t have to thole 64 editions of World Cup midmatch analysis, with variations on ‘that was a good-looking ball’ and ‘the atmosphere is electric – and not just because everyone in Russia is wearing knock-off kits from the market’.
In short, we could become the paradise nation we’ve always boasted we could be.
Culture would undoubtedly get a boost – the Edinburgh Film Festival begins this week, TRNSMT amps up on Glasgow Green, Simmer Dim lights up Shetland and, for the truly indoorsy orc or spandex fan, there’s Comic Con in Glasgow at the end of this month, offering the chance for tourists to top up on their pallor.
We could mount our own alternative athletics programme – the midgie dash from loch to car, throwing the discus (old copies of Ally’s Army) and, of course, celtic hurdles – praising or attacking something Scots without getting tangled up in a heated discussion about independence.
Is it too late to book Del Amitri, authors of the most record-breakingly morose World Cup song ever, Don’t Come Home Too Soon?
A new album could lead to a residency at Edinburgh Castle, where as dusk stretches its fingers over Princes Street Gardens, football agnostics could enjoy new work such as It’s Only a Cup, We’ll Lose in 2022, Even Switzerland’s There For God’s Sake, and To Be Honest, I Prefer Rugby.
Honestly, this could work. See you. See Scotland. See no footie.