It’s only way we’ll cope with everything on lockdown
We’re going over the endless lists of what we are missing.
Stuff like going to the game at 3pm on a Saturday – or a bacon butty in our gubs at half 11 on a Sunday morning.
Then there’s the armchair sport that’s gone out of the window.
It’s gutting not to have a Masters weekend in early April, a summer with the Euro Championships – just think, two or three games a day on the box – and the Olympics also going by the wayside.
Wimbledon is another. Man how we love those prime time Andy Murray shows when our man puts us through some five-set nerve shredder late on a Friday night.
The absence of current sport has got us all staggering down Memory Lane. Memories of the Kenny Dalglish times, our clubs conquering Europe, anniversaries of our favourite managers getting the gig or the biggest dud getting their books.
Dredging up the past can help us deal with the present but, blimey, it can also make it even harder.
It’s worse than when big Bully pulled out the speedboat. We’ve already had the speedboat and Bully has turned up to repossess it.
So perhaps we need a different approach.
Let’s forget about the good times. Let’s access the filing cabinets in our nuts and dig out the stinkers. The times when we would happily have got rid of sport then and there.
Remember the national euphoria when Leigh Griffiths curled in his second sensational free-kick against England?
Then remember a few minutes later – Harry Kane plunging a dagger into six million hearts.
Football could have been told to do one right there and then. It’s not an isolated incident. We’ve loads of tales of woe to tap into. Mind going to the World Cup in 1974 with a team packed full of European Cup winners and then not getting out of the group?
Same again four years later when we couldn’t beat Iran and yet again in 1982 and 1986. Funny how we look back on that period as one o of success.
Still, those days were h halcyon compared to t the last two decades.
The campaign-killing d defeats to Georgia, u upping our hopes by b beating Holland in a Hampden play-off only to get our pants pulled d down in Amsterdam.
Getting rumped in Kazakhstan, losing tw two zip at half-time in t the Faroes, Boozegate, 4 4-6-0 ... let the pain and m misery flow.
Our club sides have g given their fans plenty o of nightmares too.
Rangers have about s seven years’ worth to tap into from recent times.
Celtic fans should dig out the tapes of the Raith Rovers League Cup Final from 26 years ago then catch up on some of their European calamities, starting with Neuchatel Xamax.
Aberdeen punters can cast their minds back to the 9-0 rout at Celtic Park and a long list of cup exits to part-time teams.
Hibs? Dig out the book The Scottish Cup From 1902–2015.
Everyone can play along because everyone has at one point walked out of a game and said:
“I’m never going back.”
It’s not just football folk either. Golf fans, forget Paul Lawrie’s Open triumph, Colin Montgomerie’s Ryder Cup heroics or great days at St Andrews and Carnoustie.
Remember getting soaked at the Scottish Open at Loch Lomond every year, eight hours to get out the car park then Monty switching to a seven iron on the last hole at Winged Foot in 2006.
Rugby types bring to mind the seemingly endless wooden spoon scraps in the Six Nations and World Cup promises that were broken. go Scotland must be the most sport-obsessed country that is constantly let down by their sport.
Well, don’t forget it, and whenever you find yourself pining for it’s return, just think about all those boots in the unmentionables.
It might be the only way for us to get through this folks. du ht
Forget the good times. Let’s access the cabinet in our nuts and dig out the stinkers when we’d happily have got rid of sport