[ad_1]
Ssomeday maybe the run will end. Someday Scotland will get out of the group at a major tournament. But not yet, not this year. They earned a single point, failed to have a shot on target in three of the six halves of football they played in Germany and scored just twice, one of which was a strange own goal gifted to them. The brewers and barmen will miss their fans, but few will miss football.
Scottish grief comes in catalogs. Some of their previous 11 group stage exits have been the result of simply not being that good. Some are the result of underperforming on the biggest stage. And some, the cutest ones, have the air of gallant failure. The most famous – 1978, Archie Gemmill, Ally McLeod, the Dutch and all – was a great help to the third of those on the bed of the second.
How do I rate this one? It certainly wasn’t 1974, going out on goal difference after draws with Brazil and Yugoslavia because they didn’t score enough against Zaire. It wasn’t even 1996, they beat Switzerland in their last game and only went out because England conceded a late goal against the Netherlands.
But it was probably better than the last Euros, when a draw against England rather masked poor performances in defeats to the Czech Republic and Croatia. And it was certainly better than the 1954 World Cup, their first tournament, when, allowed a squad of 22, they turned up with 13, apparently convinced, in the words of Tam Reid, head of their selection committee, that “continentals don’t like to fight back”. After a 1-0 defeat by Austria, manager Andy Beattie quit before a 7-0 defeat by Uruguay.
It wasn’t great. Qualifying is to some extent a reward in itself and the estimated 200,000 thoroughly enjoyed their week and a bit in Germany. Depending on your tolerance for huge crowds of extremely drunk, their fans were either a joy or at worst a tolerable nuisance, well-intentioned and extremely loud, always there to be photographed helping an elderly woman cross the road. No one sings the hymn with the gusto it gives to the Flower of Scotland. And no one else is booing Sweet Caroline – to their credit.
The Scots were to this tournament what the Peruvians were to Russia 2018: it didn’t matter where you went, how unknown the city was, how far from wherever they played, you’d find them. They will tell stories of the great migration over decades, the legends of Munich, Cologne and Stuttgart, the lost nights, the lost days, the incredible drinking, the singing, the viral videos.
But as with Peru in 2018, there’s a sense of seizing an opportunity that only comes along every once in a while, making the most of it because you don’t know when the chance will come again – certainly not in an easily managed foreign country , a cheap flight.
Their fans are celebrated partly because they are impressive – for example, there was something exciting about the sight of the steps in front of Cologne Cathedral, the square and the surrounding streets covered in navy blue and tartan – but also because they are new and because it is much easier to praise them than the team .
It was a game they needed to win to have any chance of going through as one of the top four third-placed teams, and yet they didn’t have a shot until the 53rd minute when Che Adams fired a speculative shot from well outside the goal. box well. It was a miserable game all round, an argument to take the Euros back to eight teams, never mind 16. Hungary’s much-vaunted relationalist philosophy seemed to consist largely of John McGinn’s jingle.
after the promotion of the newsletter
Whatever glimmers of promise there were in the second half against Switzerland or in the match against Germany were snuffed out here.
Hungary were just beginning to mount the pressure when Barnabas Varga went down in the box, his collapse making it clear that something was wrong. As blankets were raised around him and doctors were quickly summoned by distressed Hungarian players, the mind inevitably returned to Christian Eriksen’s cardiac arrest at the last Euros. Football sometimes has a terrible way of reminding you that it’s just a game. Varga was taken to a hospital where it was soon reported conscious and stable. He is believed to have been unconscious before falling to the ground and broke his cheekbone in several places, requiring surgery.
Scotland will think about the penalty they could have had soon after, or the half-chance that fell to Grant Hanley, but it was Hungary who hit the post through Kevin Chobot, even before the Ujpest striker scored a late winner that could have kept Hungary up in the competition. It would be hard to describe this as a hard luck story.
It might have been different had the tournament come a year earlier, but this Scotland was a far cry from the side that beat Spain so flamboyantly at the start of the qualifiers. There will be talk of heartbreak, but in the great annals of Scottish disappointments it barely registers. Not all failures are heroic.
[ad_2]
