How will this World Cup be remembered? My first memories of a World Cup aren’t real memories. All I can call upon is a cassette recording of me and my brother singing ‘We’re on the march with Ally’s Army’ and a photo of the pair of us in big-collared Scotland tops. Dad must have been high as a kite in ‘78. Much like the rest of the country.
‘82 I remember. Finishing a game of football with my friends on the pitch at Hopeman and finding out on the walk home that Scotland had gone ahead against Brazil. We’d been so involved in our own World Cup match at Estadio Hopemano that we’d missed David Narey’s goal. I didn’t miss any of the four Brazil goals that flashed past Alan Rough.
‘86 was Strachan trying to hurdle that trackside hoarding, and Maradona putting his hand up before wiping the floor with England. From Italia ’90 I recall the bulging eyes of Toto Schillaci, the tears of Gazza and the wiggling hips of Roger Milla. ’94? Diana Ross and Roberto Baggio missing penalties, the Diva just looking daft, the Divine Ponytail looking daft AND costing Italy the World Cup, even though he’d got them to the final.
I got far too involved in ‘98. After Scotland lost the opening match to Brazil, I joined a conga with my best friend Steve at the Stirling Castle pub in Glasgow. Out the front door, down the street, in the back door, through the pub, hands in the air, out the front door, bump into a bollard. Steve and I spilling from the conga snake and landing in a puddle. Rolling about laughing as a piper stands over us playing a tune and a boy on a bicycle looks down and asks if we’re drunk. As Steve and I lie on the pavement giggling a taxi draws up and out step two women. Our girlfriends. And they think ‘they’re our boyfriends’.
A week later, same pub, I sit crying into my sweatbands. Scotland have just been humped by Morocco. My wise friend Cameron explains to me that all Scotland fans have their watershed World Cup and that this is mine. The World Cup where you realise that maybe you shouldn’t have so much faith in Scotland and might be better off expecting the worst. And I’ve not had the chance to be mature about it since as Scotland keep failing to qualify for the World Cup Finals.
In 2002, I sat in a Glasgow newspaper office, writing about a World Cup in the Far East. And four years ago I was in Germany, armed with my Deutsche Bahn rail pass, fuelled by beer and sausages, rescuing Swedish fans and keeping the Italian players’ wives company in Hamburg.
How will I remember this World Cup in South Africa? Too early to say yet, of course, but what I can say is that it’s my first World Cup as a dad. And that I’ll maybe manage to catch the second-half of the evening games after bath-time. And if that’s how I remember this World Cup, they’ll be good memories.
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