You’re not meant to enjoy this, he said. Oh, but I did...
IN the finest Tartan Army tradition, I had a precautionary beer or two before kick-off. Young bucks preload at home to mitigate nightclub prices. Seasoned Scotland fans do it because the post-match booze is customarily watered down with tears.
We join the action just in time for the pre-match predications: can Scotland do it tonight?
‘Of course they can,’ says former Scotland international Ally McCoist.
‘Definitely,’ opines current international, John McGinn, who’s actually playing. ‘Absolutely,’ affirms Gemma Fay, former goalie for the women’s international side.
She chides those who criticised Scotland coach Steve Clarke and his players for losing 2-0 to the Czechs earlier in the week. She says they have short memories.
‘LONG memories!’ I bellow from the sofa, wagging my beer bottle at her. ‘It’s long memories that we have.’ Gemma was born in 1981. My suffering with Scotland goes back to Argentina 1978.
‘So sit back, relax and enjoy,’ counsels STV commentator Rory Hamilton. That’ll be right.
At the top of the programme actor James McAvoy delivered a soliloquy for bravehearts while perched, Oor Wullie-like, on what was surely a bucket. It began with the words: ‘You’re not meant to enjoy this.’
That sounded more like the thing. The 11th minute, when John Stones flashed a header against the post, was horrible. ‘I just can’t believe he got free from his marker,’ said an exasperated cocommentator Kevin Gallacher. I didn’t find it quite so implausible.
By 16 minutes the commentary duo agree that Scotland have ‘settled well’. Yes, It’s the dogged optimism that kills you.
And yet, as the minutes tick on and the Scotland goal line remains unbreached, I dare to dream. Happens every time. We know very well to strangle such fantasies at birth and still we run with them.
In the 29th minute Stephen O’Donnell rockets a ball goalwards after a sublime Scottish move. Lunging England keeper Jordan Pickford kills the chance but the dream, dammit, survives all the way to half time analysis where all agree Scotland are playing ‘positively’ and that, in 20year-old Billy Gilmour we have an out and out star.
Who’d have believed we would have been talking this way 45 minutes in? Ally McCoist, John McGinn and Gemma Fay, perhaps, but not I. Incoming from my neighbour Steve, an Englishman, watching from his sofa next door.
‘Scotland’s future in young Billy Gilmour’s hands,’ he tells me in a text. ‘My English pals are starting to worry … they didn’t think Scotland could play that well.’
At 74 minutes – still, remarkably, at deadlock for all the England side’s on-paper superiority – the auld enemy substitute their captain Harry Kane. Ha, we have them on the run, surely.
And so the clock ticks down towards the 90 minutes, ensuring that, when glory \heartbreak finally comes, it will be all the more sweet\ agonising.
It culminates in injury time in a scrum five yards from the Scotland goal line. There are arms and legs everywhere, and the ball nowhere to be seen. It could have been a scene from Culloden.
Any minute now, I told my bottle of beer, a little white round object is going to come shooting out of that melee into that net.
That it did not – indeed, that we survived a full minute more to hear the joyous pheep of the final whistle – is a source of enormous national pride, by the way.
We snatched a draw from the jaws of defeat. That is not the familiar script at all.
I contemplated my beer, undiluted by tears, and downed it. Ah, that tasted good.