A quiet cheer for England
John Major once said that the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh defined their nationalism in terms of England but the English did so in terms of the French or the Germans. This, I think, explains why the English, or a good chunk of them, have tended to support the Scottish football team on the international stage and why Scots find it so hard to reciprocate – and why I received the following email from a friend holidaying in the south.
He wrote (the text is slightly expurgated): ‘Have just been walking round Hereford. Pubs are full of smelly, yobby, fat, singing smug oafs. And it’s not just that. Think of what it will be like if they win the cup. Imagine 50 buy canada goose jacket edmonton million smug Ss wandering about with big smug smiles. [S being the name of a mutual friend who takes a less Corinthian view of Scotland than many of his countrymen.] Personally, I would can you dry clean a canada goose coat rather be in Kashmir.’
This is going a bit far. And yet, despite my resolution to support England because of the kindness with which I have always been received in the south, I know what he means. It’s not the English who annoy us, though some of their supporters, the bovine, beer-swilling www.canadagoosejacketoutlett.com, pot-bellied kind, are rebarbative. (On the other hand the average price for a canada goose jacket foot canada goose coat $5000 no credit check signature loans soldiers of the canada goose coat 1000 bulbs garland Tartan Army, though friendly to a fault, tend to look shilpit and ill-nourished and might be better advised to apply for membership of the International Confederation of Competitive Eating.)
No, it’s the English media in general and the television commentators in particular who get our goat. The late Kenneth Wolstenholme was famously patronising buy canada goose jacket nyc about Scotland. But behind such attitudes lies an unconscious arrogance which assumes that England should win and that if they don’t there’s something profoundly amiss. This explains why the sporting press swings so violently between suicidal depression and unreasoning euphoria.
Yet even this old grievance of ours is fading away. The half-time analytical teams on television are liberally sprinkled with Celts. The amiably bumbling John Motson, wittering on about lunchtime and wine glasses, can be accused of many things but certainly not of nationalistic arrogance. And our own football commentators can be just as guilty of bias. We must be content to feed our grievances, these days, on a few rampaging Scotophobes in the London print media (I would name them except that in this politically correct age it might be defamatory to do so).
Despite all my inner counselling, I buy canada goose parka cheap found my own attitude somewhat confused. I sat in a deserted corner of the pub out of sight of the television, eating my lunch, with a glass of wine, and generally following Motson’s instructions. The fact that I couldn’t see the game worried me less than I thought it might, and I managed to miss Beckham’s penalty, which found me between pub and office. I was pleased, but I found it difficult to cheer.
For this atavism, I have to blame my upbringing. England were bigger, it was acknowledged, but not better. A good wee yin would always triumph. When the English teams took the field at Hampden, the first thing you noticed was their physical size. Yet it was remarkable how often we did manage to win. I have more or less blanked from my memory these buy canada goose parka uk ghastly internationals when they put hatfuls of goals past our hapless keepers, and treasure my recollections of ‘last-minute’ Lawrie Reilly and the day Kenny Dalglish scored by firing the ball through the English goalkeeper’s legs.
At Murrayfield, too, there was no finer moment for the bourgeois army that went to rugby internationals than beating the English. But later, this healthy patriotic pride turned into something rancid, an English-hating nationalism.
We may nurse our old loyalties and stoke the fires of our old rivalries. But the world is changing. The Old Firm stuff their teams with foreign mercenaries. For reasons which are not clear but are probably connected to social change, the supply of gifted Scottish players from the industrial heartlands has dried up as the old industries have withered. And it is a fact, unpalatable though it might be, that Scottish football players tend to leave school early and some are markedly less well educated than their counterparts overseas. The bitter old line that many foreign players speak better English than their native-born teammates is too near the truth to be comfortable.
If Scotland wants to renew its aspirations for footballing excellence, the football authorities must conduct a root-and-branch review of how they go about things. One of the most interesting aspects of the World Cup has been the way that foreign coaches have been able to take nations to new levels of achievement. A Dutch coach, can i wash my canada goose coat for example, brought South Korea’s first victory in the history of the competition and, incidentally, made Scotland’s defeat at their hands in a recent friendly seem much less extraordinary.
And, finally, the Japanese have taught us a great deal, with the excellence of their stadiums and of their manners. A Japanese proverb says: ‘Better a good heart than a fair face’; they have shown that they have both. But they are there any canada goose outlet stores haven’t quite managed to suppress the old rivalry with their co-host, South Korea. Perhaps it’s too much like asking a Scot to support England. And yet, as the tournament rolls on, I shall do my conscientious best.