It’s been a week of national euphoria and some madness, as Scotland’s men’s football team qualified for next summer’s World Cup.
Half the world will have seen those four wonderful goals we scored against Denmark on that wet, cold Tuesday night at Hampden. And in crazy Scottish style, the game was an emotional roller-coaster, the two winning goals coming in the last few minutes of stoppage time.
The beautiful game is an intriguing mixture of skill, effort and luck. But the greatest of these is luck and we must count ourselves lucky to be among the top 48 countries going to America next June. Scotland lays claim to be one of the founders of the modern game, The Scottish Football Association being formed in 1873. Of course, there was football before that but of the unregulated sort. In fact, it was banned in Scotland under the Football Act of 1424.
We’ve come a long way since then and Scotland now has the highest attendance rate at premier league matches in Europe. 780,000 people play the game at some level – in schools, local clubs, and in the professional leagues. Rugby, our second team sport, has about 50,000 players. There are 161,000 players registered with the football authorities, 23,000 of whom are women. Scotland’s women’s team is ranked 24th in the world.
So winning our way to the World Cup is a big deal. It’s the first time we’ve done so for 27 years. There were wild scenes of rejoicing at Hampden and in pubs and households across Scotland. There’s wild talk of a public holiday and of big screens being set up in every town to watch the games next June. There’s poetic talk of the achievement bringing the country together under one banner, a country otherwise divided over class, income, politics, religion, geography, sex and age.
There’s also wild talk by the Tartan Army of booking holidays in America, just to be at a World Cup with the Scotland team. It seems to me a crazy expense but 200,000 fans went to watch Scotland play in the European finals in Germany last summer. It also seems crazy to me to stage a tournament in three different countries – Mexico, the USA and Canada – and have thousands of fans jetting around between stadiums thousands of miles apart. What is that going to do to climate change – or do we all now believe it’s a myth?
It seems we do, despite the unseasonal warm spells earlier this month, then the heavy rain at the weekend and now the early snow which closed a hundred schools in the North East on Thursday.
Take the announcement this week that Exxon-Mobile is to close its ethylene refinery at Mossmorran in Fife. There’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the 400 jobs that are under threat. It’s as if we expect the age of oil and gas and plastics to go on for ever. So there are calls for the refinery to be “saved”, just like there was at Grangemouth, rather than any moves towards a transition to new greener industries.
The football triumph almost eclipsed a dramatic move by the Scottish government to head off threatened strike action by teachers in the New Year. It has outlined a plan to reduce teachers’ hours to a “flexible” four days a week. How the plan will work has yet to be decided but a reduction of 19 hours in “class contact time” was promised in the SNP’s election manifesto in 2021.
The teaching unions have long argued that Scotland’s 53,400 teachers are regularly working the equivalent of an extra day a week to catch up on marking and preparation. And a sign that parents are noticing the strain on teachers came on Tuesday when the Scottish Household Survey reported that only 69 per cent of parents were satisfied with their local school, a big drop from 85 per cent 15 years ago. The uncomfortable conclusion is that to increase teacher numbers, taxes will have to go up.
Can I end with my own personal World Cup story ? Back in the summer of 1974, Scotland was playing in the World Cup in Germany. I was just beginning my time as a young volunteer teacher at a school in Cameroon, West Africa. It was widely accepted that, because I was Scottish, I must be a brilliant football player. I was told to pull on a jersey for the Master’s team in a match against the Boys. It soon became clear, however, that I was not a football star and within 5 minutes I was substituted.
It was my first Saturday in the school and my reputation never recovered.
