Poster Potential

Scottish football fans are all in the same boat, that boat being a ferry of disappointment across an ocean of heartbreak. If you support a 2nd or 3rd division side say, no matter how well your team does you will always struggle to compete with the larger 1st division sides, the likes of Falkirk and Partick. And if you support one of these sides, you may end up in the SPL every so often, but you will struggle then to force your way into the top 6 past the likes of Hearts and Hibs. And if you’re a Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen or Dundee United fan,  the best you can realistically hope for is 3rd place, behind the Old Firm. And the Glasgow pair, as much as the rest of Scottish football are frustrated by their continual dominance, are in the boat alongside the rest. For all their domestic dominance, European success continually alludes them. The deluded may point to Europa League finals appearances by either half in recent years, but these were flashes in the pan, normal service being resumed shortly afterwards.

And the national team. The perennial ‘glorious failures’. Those who so aptly represent all that it is to be Scottish and in love with football. Always prepared to give the very best teams in the world a real go; always prepared to drop points at home to lowly eastern bloc microstates. The last 13 years have been slim pickings even for the most optimistic Tartan Army footsoldier, with only the 2003 play-off first leg against Holland giving us any real hope of the glory days returning, and we all remember what happened in the second leg, try as we might to forget.But this is a story set in headier times, Euro 96 to be exact. We had drawn England, the Auld Enemy, along with the Dutch and the Swiss. It was looking like a hard task to break our duck of never having got out of the group stages, but nevertheless we approached the tournament with optimism and enthusiasm, and none more so than myself.

My rude awakening, you would think, would have come in the final game. For a few brief minutes we were in the next round, Ally McCoist’s wonder strike (still one of my favourite goals ever) and England’s gubbing of Holland paving the way. So happy were we to be going through it didn’t even choke us too much to cheer on THEM. Until, that is, big stupid Seaman opened his big stupid legs and let Kluivert nutmeg him. I still hold a grudge to this day, to the extent I automatically dislike anyone with a moustache, and I still maintain he heard the score in our game and did it on purpose.

But no, my epiphany came a few days before the start of the tournament when I, a 13 year old boy with scabby knees, flung  on his Scotland top and ran to the newsagents. Like every other boy my age, my money was mainly spent on buying Shoot, Match, Total Football and the like. I rushed into the shop and grabbed the Euro 96 specials. And there, at the top of the front cover of one(I think it was Shoot but don’t hold me to that), was a banner proclaiming ‘free England and Scotland Euro 96 posters’. That’ll do me I thought. Back up the road and get it stuck on the wall.