Tommy Martin: The Scots are living Ireland’s World Cup dream
SHIPPING UP TO BOSTON: Scotland fans celebratre victory over Haiti. Pic: Visionhaus/Getty Images)
There is a wonderful scene towards the end of the 2004 Alexander Payne movie which came to mind this week.
Miles Raymond, played by the great Paul Giamatti, has just left the wedding of his randy, washed-up actor pal Jack Cole, the pair having spent the week together getting up to hi-jinks in California wine country. Miles is divorced and depressed, a schoolteacher and failed author.
Outside the church, he meets his ex-wife and her new husband. After small talk, she tells him that she is pregnant. Giamatti’s genius is to convey, with only a subtle shift of expression, the depth of Miles’s devastation and disappointment; the crushing sense that someone else is getting to live the life that he was supposed to have.
And that is how it feels watching Scotland take part in the World Cup.
It should have been us. They are living the World Cup life we were supposed to have. Not in a literal sense, of course. That is Czechia, the rotters who somehow contrived to make it to the World Cup in the Republic of Ireland’s stead despite seeming not that bothered about it.
We know they are not that bothered about it because Des Cahill had an item on RTÉ radio last week about how he had just returned from Prague, days before the tournament was due to start, and saw no sign of World Cup hullabaloo whatsoever. He got out his recorder and talked to some young lads at Prague airport and asked them what the story was. “We prefer ice hockey,” they shrugged, leaving poor Des dumbfounded.
But it is the Scots who have taken the World Cup by storm, in the joyful, unhinged and entirely self-aware way that we would like to think is our major tournament modus operandi, at least on those exceedingly rare occasions when we qualify for one.
As if conscious of their proud tradition of not sticking around for the knockout stages, Scotland’s fans have made it their mission to win the group stage, even if only in the modern sense of dominating the related online discourse.
They laid siege to the city of Boston with a shock and awe campaign of kilted bonhomie, drinking Massachusetts dry of Sam Adams lager and shaking Foxboro stadium to its foundations with their rendition of Flower of Scotland.
But it was their visit en masse to that venerable sporting cathedral itself, Fenway Park, that really hurt. On Sunday night an estimated 5,000 of them marched behind a full pipe band kitted out in special Scotland-themed Boston Red Sox gear to see the local baseball franchise take on the Texas Rangers.
You’ll have seen the videos by this stage, unless you are a member of some hermitic, World Cup banter-avoiding monastic order. The Scots sang lustily in the bleachers while the struggling Red Sox stank the place out on the field, raucous renditions of fan anthems like the Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond, 500 Miles by The Proclaimers and that well-known favourite of terracing hard men, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.
The sheer incongruity of what locals called a ‘European soccer atmosphere’ transplanted into the quintessential American ballpark made for viral magic, lit up by the delight with which each side of this cultural sporting divide greeted the other.
The hilarity continued throughout the week. Traffic cones placed on the heads of Boston’s historical statuary. Mass Irn-Bru drinking competitions. Dishwashing liquid tipped into the fountain Boston Common. Lots and lots of pipers. According to reporting in The Athletic, the governor of Massachusetts even legalised haggis, unavailable in the USA since the 1970s due to a ban on the consumption of sheep lung.
If this sort of carry-on sounds familiar to those of us old enough to remember Ireland’s last tournament sojourn way back at Euro 2016, then that’s because we wrote the manual on lovable if slightly needy viral fan antics.
You’ll remember the serenading of various babies, nuns and members of the French constabulary, the mass sing songs at public monuments, a man with a horse’s head kicking a ball into a fourth story apartment window. After the Euros, the city of Paris gave the Irish fans a medal for their good behaviour and herculean levels boozy content creation, the French version of legalising haggis.
But now we have no drunken antics to film and no one to tell us how great we are. The owner of The Dubliner pub in Boston (a savvy Irish expat who ordered in advance the entire Eastern seaboard’s supply of Tennent’s lager) even renamed his establishment ‘The Scotsman’ on social media, a symbolic wiping of a great lost tribe from the scene World Cup shenanigans.
Instead, we are stuck at home, listening to radio shows debate whether we should support England or not, that tired discussion staple of tournaments we are not involved in. That the answer to this question is plainly “no, of course not” doesn’t seem to stop them asking it, ad infinitum, this thinnest gruel of World Cup-related subject matter.
We are left only the exploits of Pico Lopes to give us some sense of participation in the great global party, the Shamrock Rovers captain giving Ireland a funsize World Cup experience with his defiant show at the heart of the Cape Verde defence in their 0-0 draw against tournament favourites Spain.
The Cape Verdeans have spawned their own corner of the vast World Cup viral megamarket, thanks to Pico’s LinkedIn story and the quest to get the mother of heroic 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha to the World Cup. It is the great gift of FIFA and its expansionist ways that even tiny island nations can now have their fifteen seconds of the world’s attention span, at least until another video of Roy Keane glowering at the Brooklyn Bridge comes up.
The first week of the World Cup has shown us that FIFA’s genius was to recognise how the actual football has become uncoupled from the vast, industrial quantity of content and discussion dedicated to it. The football has been a mix of the very good and very bad, but it doesn’t matter because you are on your phone during the boring bits anyway.
People thought that increasing the number of teams at the World Cup to 48 and the number of games from 72 to 104 would lead to a lack of jeopardy and lots of meaningless games. But in exchange for jeopardy, we have inventory: more games mean more stories, more talk, more videos, more fan antics, more controversies. Jeopardy can wait.
In the great cradle of consumerism, the football content is stacked high, and you can take what you want from the shelves. Over here, Mbappé, Messi and Haaland. Over there, Scotsmen at a baseball game. On aisle number five, a VAR official appearing to make a white supremacist hand gesture. Fancy a small band of Congolese supporters celebrating in Lisbon? Zlatan dissing Alexi Lalas? A German called Freddy falling in love with In-And-Out Burger? Iran getting shafted by US immigration? Random NFL stars in the crowd? The Mexican duck?
On and on it goes. As a cultural moment, this World Cup is on an epic scale. We would have loved it, as much as the Scots and way more than the Czechs. Still, at least we have Pico.
