Why Scotland can’t take much more of England’s Wembley winning streak
“It wasn’t a penalty,” I overheard my husband say on the phone to his brother on Thursday morning. “I wish we could play badly and be at Wembley too.” And on it goes. England might be in a state of fevered excitement but in Scotland, a mist has descended, thick even for July.
As fans in England took to the streets, hung off double-decker buses and climbed on top of the roof of Leicester Square tube station on Wednesday night, here it was eerily quiet.
The next day, the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail had a single line along the bottom of the front page mentioning the Three Lions’ historic feat in turning around 55 years of disappointment, plus a begrudging story on page seven, before directing readers to the sports section.
The BBC’s Scottish radio breakfast show, Good Morning Scotland, did better, with no mention at all of one of the biggest stories of the year in its 8 am bulletin.
Being unable to handle England’s success on the pitch, when it happens, is normal behaviour north of the border. To an outsider, the level of grief displayed following Wednesday’s triumph by Harry Kane and the lads might seem an overreaction to a sports fixture, but I’ve lived here long enough to appreciate their pain.
Some Scots have tried to be big about it, especially earlier on in the Euros when Scotland was due to face England in their Wembley clash and still clung to hope. They pretended all that Auld Enemy stuff was dated and Scots no longer cared about ancient football rivalry. But the bonhomie didn’t last. My brother-in-law, otherwise well balanced, said he was too old to be angry and now was overcome only by jealousy.
Being English in a Scottish household, or a Scottish pub for that matter, is not a good place to be this week.
I was able to play it safe in the semis thanks not only to my Danish descent but also to the incredible coincidence of almost sharing a surname with Denmark’s manager, Kasper Hjulmand. I could cheer with some conviction for the McDanes instead of the English.
But sadly I have no claim to Italian blood and there will be no escaping the fact that I want England to win tomorrow night.
I learnt the hard way that this can be a lonely predicament. About two weeks after moving from London to Glasgow in the nineties I was in the offices of the Daily Express when a match started. I can’t remember much except that it was Scotland against England and I was told by my colleagues to watch the television in a separate room. They must be joking, I thought, but unbelievably they didn’t seem to be. Even more unbelievably I ended up marrying one of them.
Fast forward many moons and I’ve come to recognise the symptoms of Scottish footballing distress. Sometimes they can’t even bear to look. When Scotland played England at Wembley my husband, who had been waiting nearly five years for Scotland to play England at Wembley, watched Mamma Mia on the Movie Channel.
Other sport is taken less seriously. In cricket, where Scotland has little vested interest, they become, depending on who England has to beat, the “upside down Jocks” (Australia), the “upside down, closed on Sunday Jocks” (New Zealand) and other variations on the theme.
But if it is football, the laughing stops. Witnessing events unfold on Wednesday was agony, especially when one of the ITV commentators, with minutes, still remaining, told everyone to take the next day off work. No wonder Scots are poor losers, even when they’re not contenders.
By Thursday afternoon, Boris Johnson was dropping hints about giving the country a public holiday on Monday if England wins. What is Scotland to do? It is football, not politics, as Scots like to say when hostilities get heated, but an English defeat – and silence from Number 10 – would be better for the Union.
In the post-mortems this week, English football writers’ hyperbole has known no bounds: “There is no need for tears, except for those shed in joy and relief” (Daily Telegraph); “It felt as if 55 years of footballing pain and 16 months of pandemic frustrations had vanished in one explosion of joy” (The Sun).
One journalist even hailed Gareth Southgate as the “ultimate mid-life crush”. Give Scotland a break! I’m not sure how much more of this they can take.
Emotions are running high. Sunday night might be “the loudest and most fretful night of football this nation has ever seen”, suggested The Sun’s Dave Kidd. If that’s how England feels, imagine what it’s going to be like in Scotland.
For the Scots, the lone voice of sanity came from Denmark’s Hjulmand, bemoaning the controversial penalty against his team and admitting it was a “bitter way to leave a tournament”.
Bitter, now that’s more like it.