The Scotland-England fixture is football’s equivalent of counting the rings on a tree trunk to figure out its age. The more the Auld Enemy game means to you, the more deeply it resonates as a big deal, the older you’re likely to be. For younger Scottish fans and certainly for most kids the excitement of England coming to town is almost as much about seeing their Premier League heroes as cheering a Scottish win. Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Raheem Sterling at Hampden? It’s like watching Match of the Day in the flesh. Wee Scottish boys and girls are queuing up.
The old place will be rocking at Saturday tea-time. The noise, the colour, the spectacle, the booing of the anthems, all the pageantry and rituals of the two tribes will be rolled out. It will feel invigorating and exciting inside the 52,000-seater bowl. But even so, for the older heads it will be impossible not to lament the slow erosion of what was once the world’s pre-eminent international occasion.
Kane was born in Walthamstow in 1993. Sterling was born in Jamaica a year later and was five when the family moved to north London. Eric Dier was born in Cheltenham in 1994, the family moved to Portugal when he was seven and he didn’t return to England until 2014, when he was 23. Alli was born in Milton Keynes in 1996. That quartet is a broadly representative snapshot of the current England squad. What relevance could Scotland and the Scotland team have to kids growing up in the nineties and noughties in Walthamstow, north London, Milton Keynes or Portugal?
If Scotland hardly ever played England (just half-a-dozen meetings in 18 years), Scottish clubs very, very rarely registered at the business end of the European tournaments, and there was no Scottish superstar to hijack kids’ attention, how could Scottish football distract any young English players from the razzmatazz of their own Premier League and global brands like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Brazil?
It’s easy to imagine Sterling or Dier being told that Scotland are one of England’s traditional rivals and going: “Scotland? Really? Who knew!” To them, Hampden isn’t likely to do more than stir up the sort of passing interest they would have before an away game at some traditionally noisy, awkward venue like Newcastle or Leeds. The idea of a defeat to Scotland spoiling their summer, as it once would have for Sir Bobby Charlton or Kevin Keegan, is ludicrous.
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Just as significant to the decline of old enmities is the fact the current English players have not been exposed to a consistent presence of Scots in their club dressing rooms. How often do the old players talk about the fear of losing the Auld Enemy game because of the merciless ridicule it would generate from their clubmates? Up until the 1980s the bigger English clubs were heavily represented not only in the England team but in Scotland’s. Leeds, Manchester United, Liverpool: all had their famous Scots contingents. Now Gareth Southgate is quite likely to pick a team on Saturday in which the 11 players do not have a single Scottish clubmate. Not a single Scot in the corner of the room, mouthing off about what’s in store in the bear pit of Glasgow.
For more than a century it was an annual battle of near-equals, the narrative updated by some new see-sawing of the fortunes as the pendulum swung back and fore from blue to white. Inequality and dormancy have eroded the fixture.
Scotland have won only one of the last ten meetings. There is palpable pleasure and relief north of the border, now, when a meeting passes without a heavy English victory. The 3-2 game at Wembley in 2013 was an acceptable loss. Last November’s 3-0 World Cup qualifier has been redrawn, by some, as a result which bore little relation to how the game unfolded. Scotland did deliver an organised, gutsy display, with no little quality, but England took their chances when Scotland could not, and subjected the visitors to a torrid final 20 minutes.
What Scotland-England really needs is the defibrillator of a Scottish win in a game that matters, something to shake up the narrative and return the fear and respect which is no longer really there for the English players, management, supporters and public. This World Cup tie on Saturday would be perfect but, sadly, it’s hard to see it given that England have scored three times in each of the three recent meetings.
Scotland-England will be a great old tear-up and things have not mellowed to the point that anyone will make their fortune selling half-and-half scarves. But this old fixture has become a nostalgia trip.
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Memory lane feels safe when England keep turning the current Scotland team into roadkill.
More questions than answers
Craig Whyte is a free man, his acquittal of fraud yesterday provoking a predictable meltdown for Rangers and Celtic supporters.
To Rangers fans there was a palpable sense of frustration and resentment. To Celtic fans an equally obvious enjoyment that Whyte went to court and then did walking away (he is gleefully championed by some for plunging Rangers into administration and liquidation over unpaid taxes, a scandal for which they otherwise condemn various Ibrox regimes as cheats).
Whyte’s whole Rangers saga was tawdry and cheap. Stewart Regan, the SFA chief executive, had a pre-arranged media conference yesterday and credit to whichever reporter raised the matter of Whyte’s unpaid £200,000 fine for bringing the game into disrepute. It was easy to forget the countless strands of the Whyte debacle.
But he did nothing illegal and the verdict swung the spotlight elsewhere. As for Sir David Murray and that five-year-old claim he was “duped” into selling to Whyte, the trial heard that he couldn’t get the deal done quickly enough. Maybe he hoped Whyte would be the fall guy. The jury figured Rangers’ implosion and ruin wasn’t a one-man job.
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It doesn’t always run like clockwork
When George Graham became manager of Spurs he changed the treatment hours for injured players so their sessions ended at 4pm, just as they would hit hellish traffic on the M25 as they left for home. It was an ingenious way to give any slackers a kick up the backside. The players hated it. When Lee Clark was at Kilmarnock it went down like a lead balloon when players were told they would train at the corresponding time of the next fixture, ie 3pm, 7.45pm and so on. Domestic arrangements were thrown into turmoil.
Well, boo hoo for footballers, they are not exactly out digging the roads. But it’s still a dangerous game for a manager to mess his men around. Pedro Caixinha, right, has Rangers doing three sessions a day, starting at 7am. It’s going to be a hoot when some of them next do a press conference and try to tell us they think this is a great idea.
Stewart fits the bill
Sky Sports have a vacancy for a chief Scottish football pundit. Neil McCann was a surprise appointment when he got the gig and will not be easy to replace. Measured, insightful and authoritative, Dundee’s new manager proved to be one of the best. The outstanding candidate to become McCann’s successor is on both of Sky’s rival stations, BT Sport and BBC Scotland. A pundit must be knowledgeable, perceptive, at ease and opinionated without playing to the gallery and descending into panto. Michael Stewart has all of that.