Euro 2020: Scottish football joy deserved after decades of disaster

Scotland qualify for next Year’s European Championships and the nation rejoices. We squeeze in by a back door entry and do so by winning a penalty shoot-out on a wet night in Belgrade. And of course we do it the hard way.

Leading 1-0 with a couple of minutes to go and then conceding the equaliser ensured nails would be bitten as the shoot-out loomed. Actually, it wasn’t just a back-door that we have entered by, but a basement one, for we had come only third in the normal qualifying pool, and then were offered a second chance in a subsidiary group of matches.

No matter. For the first time since 1998, after years of failing to reach the World or European Championships proper, Scotland will be there, and Nicola Sturgeon can lead the nation in cheering the team on. It’s been a very long wait. The Scottish Parliament wasn’t yet in being in 1998.

It’s also a far cry from the glories of the past. I am old enough to have been brought up hearing talk of the “Wembley Wizards” who, with a five-man forward–line, none of them more than 5 foot 6 inches in height, beat England 5-1. We all knew too that we were the people who had taught the game to the world; the “passing-game”, for example, being developed by the amateurs of Queen’s Park in Glasgow, and then taken south by professionals to football clubs mostly in Lancashire.

We were cocky, and not without reason. One of the first victories I remember was also at Wembley, 3-1 in 1949. The following year the Scottish Football Association in their arrogant indifference to foreign football declined an invitation to take part in the World Cup in Argentina. Well, they didn’t say a flat “no”, rather that they would only go if they won the Home Nations Championship – which they didn’t. Perhaps it was just as well. That was the tournament in which the equally arrogant England were beaten by – of all countries – the USA.

We did go to the next World Cup in Switzerland. Organisation was poor. I think we took only thirteen or fourteen players, and no training kit. We lost to Uruguay; they scored seven or eight goals. We scored none.

The humiliation was shrugged off, not without reason. Throughout the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, lots of great players were still being produced in Scotland. It’s a long list, including Denis Law and Kenny Dalglish. All the outstanding English clubs of these decades – the Spurs side that did the double, Manchester United, Leeds United, Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, all European Cup winners , were stuffed to the gills with Scots. Moreover, Celtic became the first British club to win that Cup, doing so with a team all born within forty miles of Celtic Park.

There were the great occasions, none better than Wembley 1967, when England, winners of the World Cup the previous summer ,were beaten 3-2. It wasn’t only the win and the score that delighted; it was also that for much of the second-half, the Scots, notably Jim Baxter, seemed to toy with their opponents.

Success in tournaments continued to elude the national team. Sometimes, despite the talent available, we didn’t even qualify. Ill-timed injuries and crossed club-and-country loyalties, being the excuse if not the reason.

The 1974 World Cup staged in Germany seemed promising. We had a good team with players who had acquired the winning habit with Celtic, Rangers and English clubs and a sensible low-key manager , Willie Ormond, a member of the great Hibs forward-line of the post-war decade. There was a wee press scandal before they set out, when Jimmy Johnstone, Celtic’s wizard of the wing, one of the last of the “tanner ba’” players, got into a boat after a convivial session in the team’s Largs hotel and seemed determined to row to Ireland. Ormond, not himself averse to what the eighteenth-century called a meridian, or sociable mid-morning drink, took it in his stride. The incident was smoothed over.

The football itself was one of these “if only” things. With one win and two draws, Scotland failed to qualify for the knock-out stages and were homeward–bound without losing a match. One draw was against Brazil – if only captain Billy Bremner had prodded home a chance a couple of yards out – and the other against Yugoslavia. Then, beating New Zealand in the first match, we had idly scored only two goals. Not enough; we were out on goal difference.

Then came Argentina ’78: high hope, humiliation, hubris. It was a time of rising self-confidence in Scotland: North Sea Oil (SNP slogan “it’s Scotland’s Oil”) and the prospect of devolution. Football reflected this. The new manager, Ally MacLeod, a fairly successful club manager with Ayr and Aberdeen, cockily promised victory. Asked what he would do if Scotland won the World Cup, he blithely replied “retain it.” Euphoria reigned as “Ally’s Army”prepared to set off to Argentina. A song by the comedian Andy Cameron in which he declared that “Scotland are the greatest football team” soared to the top of the (Scottish) charts.

Of course it went wrong, horribly wrong. Preparation was poor, games that should have been won weren’t. One player failed a drugs test and was sent home. It was evident that MacLeod was out of his depth. Yet, ironically – and irony would soon be the tone in which Scottish football was discussed – we saved our best till the last when all was lost, doing well against the talented Netherlands. It was a match in which Archie Gemmill’s goal was acclaimed as Goal of the Tournament.

Confidence in Scottish football died in Argentina. The novelist, William McIlvanney, remembered a wee man sitting on the edge of a pavement and asking “can we no’ iver dae onything right?”

Good question. Scottish football has not yet recovered from Argentina ’78.

Social, economic and cultural explanations have all been advanced. No doubt there is something in all of them. The long teachers’ strike of the early 1980s led to a decline of school football. Even after the dispute was settled, few teachers were either able or willing to coach sport. And, of all sports, football suffered most from this disinclination.

The decline of heavy industry, the closure of coal mines, steelworks and shipbuilding yards, all this destroyed the working-class culture in which so many footballers had been reared. Individually, they might have been happy to escape the pits and yards by way of football, but they carried the combination of individualism and solidarity into their life as players, coaches and managers.

Then, if you compare (as fans always do) Scotland and England, you can see reasons, even apart from the greater wealth of English clubs since SKY and other independent TV channels turned their attention to football, why Scotland has fallen further behind. The stars of top English clubs are mostly Latin American, Eastern European, or black or mixed race English boys and young men, from second or third generation immigrant families. There has been much less of this immigration in Scotland, and this is reflected on the football field.

Scotland’s long record of international failure has meant that many in the two largest groups of fans, Celtic or Rangers supporters, transfer little of their passion from club to country. The doggedly loyal Tartan Army has responded, with a degree of self-mockery, to the decline and expectation of failure by cultivating irony– also , by being cheerful and, on foreign trips, conspicuously well-behaved– not always the case with Celtic or Rangers fans, one should add. In adopting this approach the Tartan Army not only reconciles itself to disappointment, but distinguishes itself from the hooliganism still so often associated with English football fans.

Well, for the moment at least, there is something other than the pleasures of irony to reconcile us to footballing life. The present manager Stevie Clarke is sensible and level-headed. He makes no easy boast, and he has learned from his experience as manager of a club, Kilmarnock, where you have always to try to do more with little. So he has been building his team from the back; you’ve more chance of winning once you have made yourself hard to beat.

Moreover, all managers need luck, and he may be just a bit luckier than his recent predecessors. For the first time in years there are players in his squad who are regulars in the English Premiership, playing for Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United. In short there may be better material than there has been for a long time.

Meanwhile, the long awaited relief of qualification for the European Championship sees us in the same pool as England. Blood-stirring stuff for many. But don’t let us return to unearned triumphalism. Let’s stick with Tartan Army irony. It suits us better and saves us from looking foolish.