IT'S THE smell I remember most. A Hampden burger van had caught fire and the flames seemed to have spread to the produce, although we couldn't be sure. The pong was a different one to when the blaze began, but it wasn't a particularly foody pong. Even the most BSE-riddled cow, put out of its misery and then burned, would whiff of roast beef; but this was different.
So that's my most vivid memory of the last Scotland-England "friendly" in 1989: a fake meat smell before the fake meat of the match. This wasn't 1967 and Scotland's "unofficial world champs" triumph. This wasn't 1971 and the first rendition of the cl
assic terrace chant, "What did you do with the bracelet, Bobby Moore?" This wasn't 1977 when Wembley resembled a just-liquidated garden centre, giving away clumps of turf for free. It was 1989 and England's centre-forward that sunny May afternoon was a clodhopper called Steve Bull.
Bull actually scored in England's 2-0 win, but who was counting? The match wasn't even part of the old Home International Championships, axed five years previously. During the 1970s, when the ancient rivalry was at its most intense, you'd often hear it said that there was no such thing as a friendly involving Scotland and England. But in Thatcher's 80s – bullied by a Prime Minister who hated football and wasn't too keen on outward expressions of Scottishness either – the sport's authorities downgraded the fixture and its status ended up sub-friendly.
So do we want the match back? Gordon Smith thinks we do. The SFA's top blazer is trying to revive it as part of a series of glamour friendlies. But I'm not sure this is a great idea. For one thing, we care even less for friendlies than we did in 1989. If Scotland v England was a crummy burger back then, it would surely be a past-its-sell-by-date jar of meat paste today. Well, wouldn't it?
The rivalry at its fiercest always meant more to Scotland, but English club dressing-rooms were full of Scots so the whiteshirts wanted to win the match, even if their fans hardly bothered turning up. It's different now. Steve Bull has been replaced by a re-styled John Bull, the Union Jack waistcoat swapped for Cross of St George beach-shorts. The Englishman today brays for his team as if football has just been invented. He also, for the first time, gets extremely narked by Scotland's non-support of his boys in international tournaments not involving us. For that reason, he'd probably love the opportunity for the whiteshirts to play Scotland again, and to whip them.
Should we give him that chance? It would be bloody-minded, perverse and old-skool Scottish of us to say "no". But just as football, post-1989, got "sexy" and the food at matches finally got edible, so Scotland since then has become a bit more sophisticated, a bit more self-determined, and a bit less mired in the bitter disputes of yore. By that reasoning, we should say "yes" and play them and then be grown-up about it if we lose.
Of course, many of us don't want to be grown-up all the time. The powers-that-be intervene in so many areas of life now, getting on the collective wick, and football is one where some political incorrectness is permissible. A revival of Scotland v England might be a useful temperature gauge of this nation (and that one) and tell us how far we've come since the advent of all-seated stadiums and an all-seated Parly, too.
But I still don't know if I want the old game back. There's a nostalgia argument for it, and a football development argument against it. Maybe we should toss a coin. (Just not a burger).
The full article contains 657 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
