I don’t know. I really don’t. It can’t go on. But it will. It bloody will. There are times when watching Scotland play international football produces the sensation that one’s actually trapped inside a Beckett play. It might seem a tragicomedy to you but it’s no fun in here. A game of two halves, as a friend puts it, in which bugger all that’s good happens. Twice.
We can all recite the horrors. The 7-0 hammering against Uruguay in 1950 1954*. The 9-3 unpleasantness against England. Peru. Iran. Costa Rica. The two draws against the mighty Faroe Islands. But all bar the last were at the Big Show and even the grim fiascos against the puffin-munchers were away from home (like Alan Rough, we are clutching at thin air here).
So a 2-1 victory – at home – against Liechtenstein still counts as one of the worst results in Scottish football history and is made only marginally more palatable by the consolation that it could have been, and deserved to be, even worse.
And so it came to pass that in the seventh minute of injury time Scotland grabbed a second goal to claim an infamous victory over an Alpine Meadow and sustain (sic) the dream hallucination we could actually qualify for the European Championships.
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