THE last time the Scotland men’s national team qualified for a major tournament I was two years old. My earliest memory of a game is from 2003. It is not a pleasant one: Netherlands 6, Scotland 0.
It was hard to imagine it getting any worse than that, but it’s taken another 18 years to see the team at a finals, playing at Hampden, no less.
I was among the lucky few to get a ticket for the game, though by full time I did not feel so fortunate.
In these strangest of times, nothing feels quite as it should. Even the tournament’s name is wrong.
To enter Hampden is to enter a fortress, though you suspect even Robert the Bruce would struggle to trick his way into this one. The stadium’s grandeur is obscured by huge fences and obscene amounts of Uefa branding.
But it’s been 23 years, after all, and it’d take more than stringent security checks, empty seats and Bono’s Uefa 2020 theme song (“We Are The People”) to dampen the Tartan Army’s spirits.
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Our prescribed arrival time was relatively generous, meaning we only had around 90 minutes to kill before kick off.
The recent spell of hot weather in Glasgow was well and truly over, providing an authentic Hampden experience.
As kick-off approached and fans trickled in you quickly felt as if there were far more than 12,000 in the stadium, which was restricted to 25% of capacity.
When the DJ was kind enough to switch from the Uefa-set playlist of corporate ads and blaring EDM music, it truly felt like Hampden was rocking. Loch Lomond got us on our feet, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie had us dancing and Flower of Scotland had many in tears.
A HUGE cheer at Hampden as ‘I can boogie’ comes on - the sound of the chorus is amazing pic.twitter.com/tRvXqlwZN1
— Miguel Delaney (@MiguelDelaney) June 14, 2021
And then the football started.
The crowd was ready to erupt at the mere hint of a goal. Throw-ins and corners prompted spine-tingling roars. But when the goals did eventually come you could hear a pin drop. The sound of Patrick Schick’s exquisite lob nestling gently in the net is haunting. The sound of David Marshall coming crashing in afterwards traumatising.
Sitting behind the goal, I had a perfect view of the horror show, and the delirious celebrations of the small pocket of Czech fans.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. And yet it seems this is how it always is, for Scotland at least.
But as the Tartan Army knows, lows make highs all the sweeter. And so we look to Wembley, certainly not in expectation, but in that cruelest of things – hope.
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