God save the battle between the British and the Scots

Before the Union Jack returned thanks to him in the honor roll of the sacred Wimbledon tournament, Andy Murray believed he smelled like air, putting doubts and complaints into a sentence that he understood so much. And was not silent. “To the British,” he said, “when I win I am British, when I lose I am Scottish”. The feeling that we might say distance is a constitutional act of rivalry, perhaps discrimination, that turns 150 in a matter of days and has since bounced wrong like a ball. The ancient enmity (auld foe) between Scotland and England came into play with scrum on a rugby field in Stockbridge, which through the game marked the enmity between the two peoples of previous centuries, from the construction of Hadrian’s Wall to William of Normandy in 1072. started with the attack. The Battle of Braveheart, famous for the disaster of James IV at Floden Field. The memory of what Elizabeth I did to Mary Stuart certainly seemed distant three centuries later, but when the two national teams took the field for the first international rugby match on March 27, 1871, both sides There was not much sympathy, and to be honest, there never will be again, until a referendum on independence, even the opposite on Brexit.

charge of forty

Rugby at the time was a case of 20 vs 20, a much longer battle than it is today, 100 minutes against 80 today, and the score was also different. Each effort was worth one and not five, but that was really only valid after the change of set piece, which is why aim in English today is called effort like a verb. In the sense of: Try it, let’s see if you convert it. It seems that the rugby parliamentarians of the late nineteenth century wished to reward greater accuracy with their feet, as going to the goal was fairly simple, the defense was not organized as in the contemporary interpretation of the game. The discipline and tactical rigor in the game is culture, not nature, and it was a bit naive, let’s say – horror – mainly for fun.

doubts about the referee

Many details are known about that match. It is known that it was played at Raeburn Place, Edinburgh’s academics court. It is known that there were about four thousand spectators and that the entrance ticket cost one shilling. It is known that Scotland won 4-1 and the referee raised more than a doubt, in the sense that – er – he was Scottish. Her name was Haley Hutchinson Badam, she was the dean of a college, and she interpreted the rules in a very personal way that was already suspicious of them. It is said that he had a method which he believed to be infallible in making his decisions. They believed that if one team protested, they were wrong.

Three months ago some papers published in the newspapers started this game. The first appeared in the Times on December 4, 1870, inviting “rugby match players” to give each other a code. In fact, the gentlemen saw each other about half a month later (January 21, 1871) and formed the Rugby Football Union. The bulk of the discussion revolved around the legality of tripping, and ultimately it was these issues that marked the dividing line with football. The second letter will arrive on 8 December, published in both The Scotsman and Bell’s Life, a London magazine. He pushed the best English footballers to form a team to fight Scotland and it was for one of the Blackheaths to become the first captain in history, Frederick Stokes, who had already boarded a train traveling at night. . Meanwhile Scotland had conducted a series of tests to select the best. Except for the referee, of course. It was led by Francis Moncrieff, second son of Baron Moncrieff of Tulibole. Jersey Colour: Scotland brown, England white with rose on chest.

how hard it is to be together

We know that the first player in the goal was Scotsman William Cross, but the first player to score it and therefore score a point in history was Angus Buchanan, which ended with JK Rowling’s imagination in the world of Harry Potter. Stories published on official website Pottermore. In that context Buchanan became a satirist, i.e. the son of a family of magicians.

How these two worlds find themselves under the same Olympic flag every four years remains a major dilemma. At the London Games, hostess Great Britain had to offer a national team in every discipline, and bringing together Scots was a tiring diplomatic business, who did not want to pass for the English in the eyes of the world. The Commonwealth Games organized by the city of Glasgow in 2014 became an opportunity to show yourself better than the people there.

Sporting Scotland’s idol is Sir Chris Hoy, cyclist with six golds and one silver on track at the Olympics, the Briton with the most titles of any sport at the long Games, until a draw with Jason Kenny in Rio. , English, also a cyclist, but with three team titles against two. It is a matter of pure Scottish pride that the greatest football thinkers on the island are their Jock Stein, Bill Shankley, Matt Busby, Alex Ferguson, the only British manager to have won the Premier League with Kenny Dalglish among many foreigners.

second anniversary

The next year will be up to football to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the ancient hostilities, to commemorate the first Scotland–England played at Partick, a suburb of Glasgow on 30 November 1872, considered by UEFA and FIFA to be the first official international match in conflict history. . It ended 0-0 and we’ll hear about it again in June, when the two teams will be in the same group at London Wembley Stadium (at least according to current plans). Football, perhaps even more so than rugby, has over time been the terrain on which to overturn political power ties for the Scots. The rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 1970s is linked to the successes of the generation of Dennis Law, Jimmy Johnstone and Kenny Dalglish, the first winners of the Ballon d’Or in 1964, the other two later on the podium. The chorus heard in Hampden Park (“We hate the British”) in 1974 was a precursor to the election of the SNP’s 11 MPs in Westminster. The pre-match anthem for Scottish is God Save the Queen, not Bud, but Flower of Scotland, sung by the crowd (while the crowd was there).

The match at Wembley on 4 June 1977 turned into a Scottish attack on the capital, and the victory turned into a field attack. A door was smashed, the turf became a memento, Ultra sang: “Give us Westminster and we laugh at Wembley.” There are those who argue that the 1979 independence referendum failed because Scotland did so at the 1978 Mundial. What is certain was a thrill when England advanced to the semi-finals at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. All behind the Scots, intimidated by the idea of ​​others taking to the streets and celebrating the title like in 1966. From a sentence by Andy Murray in 2006, he joked, the abbreviation ABE was born, Nobody but England, that is: I hope everyone wins except England. It’s clear that the British tie it to their finger and you’re just a Scotsman when you lose at Wimbledon.

a strange coincidence

A unique coincidence was seen on the day of the 16th round in Moscow, Colombia-England. The SNP’s representatives in parliament were more than usual in their speeches. They talked, exchanged it and never left it. Until the British looked at the clock and understood. The Greenwich Mean Time game was on television at 8 p.m. and the hostility against the Old Enemy was finding the most modern and arbiter in its versions.

Feather Friday 5 March 2021