RUTH DAVIDSON: I CRIED TEARS OF JOY AT WIN HEROES TOLD TO SET SIGHTS ON WORLD CUP
SPORT matters. Football matters. Scotland’s win on Thursday night and qualification for the European Championships matters. After a fairly hellish 2020 all round, November is shaping up to be a good month. Civility is returning to the White House and a Covid vaccine is giving us hope for a return to some form of normality, where meeting friends or hugging family is not a dangerous act.
Now the national team has got Scotland back to a major tournament, where the football superfan and mildly interested sofa supporter alike can feel part of a shared moment and will our country on.
I love football. I have always loved football. From being the first girl to play for Largo Boys Under-14, to it being one of the easy conversations I’ve always been able to have with my father in adulthood.
A former footballer (for Partick Thistle and Portadown professionally, Selkirk and Gala in the amateurs) Dad spent enough time on wind-blown pitches as a young man that he now appreciates the joy of being able to watch at home, in the warm, in high definition, and with the fridge on hand, so we have maybe only been to a handful of games together.
Me, I love a live match. The walk to the ground, the feeling as you come up the steps into the stands and the whole stadium opens up around you.
Whether East End Park or Hampden, it’s the sense of possibility that gets me. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. Each game has its own personality and every now and again a player refuses to read the script, grabs a game and just drags it into his win column.
For supporters, these are the ‘I was there’ moments. They are unforgettable and forge a sense of community with those who shared them in the stadia.
I’m not really one for mementos or scrapbooks or cuttings files. But I do have a three-part photo frame with pictures of me and my friends arm-in-arm up in the gods of Hampden sandwiching my match ticket from our 1-0 win over France.
It might have been 2006. Defender Gary Caldwell might have been an unlikely match-winner (especially as the width of the post denied the great Thierry Henry for the visitors) but, and this is the crucial part, I was there.
I was there, too, in the rain as Italy ended our Euro 2008 qualification dream with a 90th minute goal from a free kick.
Before our last major competition finals in France 1998, I was a skint student surviving on part-time jobs and student loans after Tony Blair scrapped the grants system for poorer students that I had taken advantage of in my first year.
My mate and I decided we wouldn’t try and get ourselves over the Channel for any games because we were broke. We needed to work over the summer to give us a cushion going into the next year of classes.
Anyway, we’d be graduated and have proper jobs by the next one and we could do it properly.
Yes, Scotland had missed out on the USA ‘94 World Cup, but that had been an aberration. A glitch. An unforgivable error, but only an error. We were secure in our teenage selves that Scotland qualified for tournaments and would keep qualifying for them. What did we know?
So, 22 years later and more playoffs and qualifiers than I care to work out, I collect memories like rare artefacts – the pride of a Dunfermline player, Stevie Crawford, being picked for the national side.
Then there is the tarnishing of those memories – Crawford being brought on during the humiliating 2-2 draw with the Faroe Islands during the disastrous era under Berti Vogts. I will never again assume passage to the big competitions and I will teach my son to savour every win and pick himself up after every loss and keep the hope and faith alive.
There will be none of this wallowing in ‘glorious failure’ schtick. No ‘typical Scotland’ defeatism. No sense of inevitability or written-inthe-stars nonsense.
Football matches are won and lost on the pitch, yes, but also by the training ground prep and the endeavour and togetherness of the team. This incarnation of the Scotland squad is one that is easy to love. There is a smattering of big-name stars from Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United, Celtic and Rangers, as in the past.
The line is led by a QPR striker with a thick Aussie accent, and there is a marvellous servant in goalie Craig Marshall, now 35 and plying his trade in the English Championship. We have grafters playing club games for Motherwell, Norwich and Sheffield United. All overseen by former Kilmarnock coach Steve Clarke, who even pundit Darren Fletcher described after his low-key post match interview as ‘a bit dour’.
But as a group they have gone about their business honestly and given their all. Like Arsenal defender Kieran Tierney switching sides of the pitch so that both he and captain Andrew Robertson, a Champions League winner, can be accommodated in the line-up.
Or Manchester United midfielder Scott McTominay agreeing to repurpose himself as a centre back at the heart of defence in order to help the team.
Scotland’s goal during the match was scored by Celtic’s attacking midfielder Ryan Christie – a player who has spent half of his five years with the Old Firm side on loan to Inverness and Aberdeen.
Interviewed after the match, he fought back tears as he explained why this win – and Scotland’s qualification for the first major tournament since he was a toddler – meant so much. ‘It’s for the whole nation.
‘It’s been a horrible year for everyone. We knew coming into the
After a hellish 2020, November is shaping up to be good
They manfully went about business quietly but with belief
game we could give a little something to this country. I hope everyone back home is having a party tonight, because we deserve it.’
My partner – an Irishwoman, so no similar drought of international tournaments – couldn’t understand why I started crying, too.
This side has none of the swagger or boastfulness of the Ally MacLeod era and none of the truculence exemplified by Gordon Strachan.
They manfully went about their business quietly but with belief, helping each other out all over the pitch with a resilience and tenacity which make them hard to beat.
As I ease into my 40s, all football players – like policemen – have started looking younger. But last night’s team weren’t a bunch of young boys – they thought, worked, acted, spoke and carried themselves as men beyond their years.
The most touching thing after all the right words were spoken in the post-match interviews? Seeing footage from the dressing room as the whole team bounced along to disco classic Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.
These heroes got to enjoy being daft laddies for a moment, too, having successfully carried the hopes of a nation on their shoulders and delivered for us all. The whole of Scotland thanks you.