Letter from Marseille: Scotland are fearing to dream once more

This Scotland side does have heart, fighting their way back into each of their summer games, but the flip side of that is that they are still prone to careless lapses

DREAMING BIG: Scotland players during the captain's run at the Stade de Marseille. Pic: Mike Egerton/PA Wire

One of the most painful and indelible memories scorched into the Scottish sporting psyche – even for those who were too young to witness it first hand – was the overblown build-up followed by crushing failure of the national football team at the 1978 World Cup.

Ahead of departure for the Argentina tournament, a crowd of 30,000 attended a rally at Hampden Stadium where the players were paraded around the pitch in an open-top bus – a weird kind of pre-departure welcome home event – with the ebullient team manager Ally MacLeod declaring that he’d cleared a place in his wardrobe for his World Cup winner's medal.