Sport and alcohol is a toxic mixture

Jones episode highlights Scotland’s shame

TRAVELLING back from a game. Avoiding eye contact on a train. Sticking a pair of earplugs in and pretending to be oblivious to the foul language from the young team incapable of buying a ticket without purchasing half a dozen cans of Tennent’s and a bottle of Buckfast as well.

Most of us have felt like Eddie Jones at some point.

And the video of England’s rugby coach being verbally abused in Manchester by a posse of rejects from Trainspotting 2 was both depressing and embarrassing.

Jones isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He gets up noses. He says what he likes and likes what he says.

But to aim potty-mouthed, verbal, personal abuse at the man seconds after he’d agreed to pose for selfies was the conduct of low-rent cretins.

And provided further evidence of two unpleasant traits amongst too many Scottish sports fans.

An ugly and unpleasant strain of anti-English xenophobia. Allied to an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

The Tartan Army’s casual chants about Jimmy Hill were bad enough in the days when the Black and White Minstrels was a staple of Saturday night telly.

That Scots should now torment an Australian on the 9.15 from Edinburgh because he coaches the England rugby team is ridiculous.

In the aftermath of a 25-13 Calcutta Cup defeat, Jones could hardly have been any more magnanimous or generous.

There really was no excuse for a neddish underclass to inflict their boozed-up incoherence on a man minding his own business in the corner.

Scotland has a problem with alcohol. And sport acts like a light for the kind of scatter-brained moths unable to take a train from Paisley to Port Glasgow without a bottle of tonic wine for company.

Someone really should have told Jones that letting the train take the strain was always a bad idea.

A man should be able to travel in peace — cattle class or otherwise — without being publicly hassled.

But there are good reasons why people prefer driving to games these days. And seeing what happened to a 58-year-old man last Sunday is one of them.

Public transport is a lottery. And wherever a big game takes place, personal space and peace and quiet is trampled on like freshly fallen snow.

The assumption is that the miscreants were Scots rugby fans, yet the truth is this.

They could have been fans of any Scottish sport you care to mention.

Fans of SPFL football clubs were quick to seize on the rugby rage with undisguised glee.

FOOTIE fans were branded second-class citizens by the Scottish Government’s Offensive Behaviour in Football Act, a ham-fisted, ill-conceived law which exacerbated the very treatment it was intended to stop.

Yet the treatment of Jones proves SNP politicians were firing at the wrong target.

Because football is no more to blame for Scotland’s unhealthy, abusive relationship with alcohol than rugby, golf or darts.

Sport — any sport — is just the excuse for people to go out and get royally plastered.

For many, a day at Murrayfield or Hampden is a pretext; an excuse for people to participate in the only sporting activity in which Scotland truly remains a world-class superpower. Boozing.

And woe betide anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves on the same train with a bunch of half-cut halfwits travelling to or from a high-profile sporting event.

Booking seats in the same carriage as a dozen or so Scots travelling to Aintree for the Grand National last April was a reality check. The McGowan twins (11 going on 50) decided there and then that fans of football, rugby, horse racing or any other sport are probably best avoided.

And the treatment of Jones makes it hard to put up a counter argument.

Those bozos in Manchester knew precisely who he was. And their behaviour was a mild embarrassment to decent Scots everywhere.

Coaching the England rugby team will always make a man a public target. The job comes with a nice salary and a high profile.

But come the negotiations for his next contract, Jones really should be asking his agent to investigate a new perk.

A fast car and driver with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Edinburgh’s sharpest exit routes.