The <i>IoS</i> Save Our Scotsmen's survival guide: How to make the best of it, win or lose

Sunday 30 January 2011 01:00 GMT
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You're a Scot living "dahn saff". You work in England. Many of your chums are English. Maybe even your children think they're English, except the nice middle one who occasionally wears her dark blue shirt to ingratiate herself with her old dad. Football's your game, but you take your victories where you can find them. Curling at the Winter Olympics, for example. Elephant polo. George Galloway travelling to the States and sticking it up the Senate. Desperate? Maybe.

Britain, though, is laying claim to the man carrying your people's hopes on his shoulders – while he's successful, of course. Yet you know many of your English colleagues would prefer to see him lose, giving them a stick with which to beat you. These are desperate times.

The IoS – with more than 20 years' experience of this sad condition – offers its survival guide for tomorrow after the sickening inevitability of Andy blowing it.

(And please, Andy, don't do the feeling your injured thigh thing, or blaming anyone else, or that tentative waiting for the other bloke to lose, rather than going for it.)

Or, in the one-in-a-million chance that maybe, just maybe, one of us might actually, after all those years – after the debacle in Argentina, that 6-0 drubbing by the Netherlands, that fightback against Spain only to lose in the last 10 minutes – emerge on top of the world, we proffer our suggestions on how best to crow.

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