We have every right to feel Swede and sour
IT’S a good giggle getting ready to cheer on Sweden against England. All ABBA songs, lingonberry jam on your meatballs and dreaming of the BBC commentary team descending from irksome bombast to fearful silence in the way you would when whiteying on snus.
Until the penny drops, that is. And the oppressive sweetness of your umpteenth mixed fruit Kopparberg makes way for anger and an acrid aftertaste.
This Swedish lot made it to the last eight of the World Cup. This motley crew of creaking old warhorses and honest triers who, somehow, managed to figure out a way to be greater than the sum of their parts and conspire to knock out the likes of Holland, Italy and Germany along the way.
Good on them. But if they can go so deep into a major competition through graft and organisation, why can’t Scotland? Why have we given up all hope of
ever reaching such lofty heights, stuck in the house watching all this unfold on the telly for the last 20 years while Sweden and Iceland and Greece and Northern Ireland and flippin’ Wales all have their moments in the sun?
We used to beat Sweden for fun. Big Roy Aitken and that lot scaring the life out of them in the tunnel at Italia ’90.
Wee John McGinlay scoring at Ibrox in the France ’98 qualifiers before letting Jim Leighton put on the Davy Crockett hat and show what repelling an onslaught is really all about.
Sweden had very good players then. Tomas Brolin, Anders Limpar, Jonas Thern and Stefan Schwarz on that unforgettable night when Scotland beat them in Genoa. Jesper Blomqvist, Martin Dahlin and a certain Henrik Larsson joining some of them six years later.
They had more glamorous players than us, but they did not quite have our togetherness and sense of purpose. Now, the boot is on the other foot. And it hurts.
Look at their squad. Only two of them got close to the Champions League last season. We had Andy Robertson in the final and a squad of guys in the Celtic team involved in the group stage.
Of those, Kieran Tierney could yet be moving to the Premier League for £25million.
When he arrives there, he will be taking on Robertson, Scott McTominay, Stuart Armstrong, Tom Cairney, Ryan Fraser, Callum Paterson, Barry Douglas, Matt Ritchie and a number of others. Victor Lindelof, who is hardly a Manchester United regular, is Sweden’s only EPL representative.
Emil Forsberg at RB Leipzig is their one creative player at a highperforming club. Viktor Claesson is with FK Krasnodar, but even Garry O’Connor once got himself a contract in the Russian League.
Other than that, you are looking at committed but ordinary players enjoying some wonderful escapism from ever more ordinary club careers.
Andreas Granqvist is 33 and about to join Helsingborgs in the Swedish Second Division. Albin Ekdal just helped get SV Hamburg relegated.
Up front, Marcus Berg is winding down in the United Arab Emirates, while Ola Toivonen started only eight games for Toulouse as they finished 18th in France’s Ligue 1 last term and never managed 90 minutes.
All of that showed against England yesterday. They did force three good saves from Jordan Pickford through an admirable refusal to give up.
But they lost, deservedly, to an England team whose progress to the semi-finals — after scraping a draw at Hampden — is similarly bamboozling.
Despite issues in certain positions, we have a better pool of talent than Sweden. Yet, there they were yesterday, stepping out in a World Cup quarter-final just hours before Croatia, a country like us with a population of five million, had a go at it themselves.
Events in Russia have not brought anywhere near the same level of soul-crushing agony, the same low sense of self-worth, as Euro 2016, watching Northern Ireland get through their group and Wales, for crying out loud, reach a semi-final.
Just imagine what the next major tournament will be like, though, if Scotland are not there.
Games at Hampden and nothing to look forward to other than traipsing along to the Fan Zone at George Square and half-heartedly wishing some bloke from Montenegro all the best or joining in the Viking clap with the Iceland fans, who still bother travelling to the Euros now the novelty has worn off.
Scotland must get there. If they don’t, that anger over watching every other country worth a jot enjoy these golden moments every couple of years must be made clear to everyone at the Scottish FA.
It is harder not to qualify for the Euros these days, but we managed it last time round with Gordon Strachan then being allowed to keep his job and torpedo our World Cup hopes.
SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell has denied publicly that he was parachuted into his new job as part of a carve-up that saw certain board members get Alex McLeish into position as team manager.
However, it remains difficult not to feel there might have been a little more rigour with both appointments. Certainly, the SFA needs to win back the confidence of the public. We need to be doing better in every regard.
McLeish needs to know his firstchoice team, bond them together in a settled style and win this Nations League group with Israel and Albania. We need to get through — or there should be hell to pay.
Having our noses rubbed in it on our own doorstep will be just too much to bear.
We have spent longer than anyone cares to remember agonising over the demise of our national game with the latest answer, Project Brave, having already been written off by Maxwell as a waste of time.
Yet, the absolute nadir may only be a couple of years away.
If Football Coming Home and 1966 all over again sounds like Hell on Earth, there is something altogether more awful coming over the horizon unless we get our finger out.