I AM PICKING up the nostalgia theme of my previous diary entry to indulge some of our own, journeying back west to Stuttgart, which history buffs tell me was once the scene of a Republic of Ireland win. (Studies in significant Irish wins have long since become work for historians rather than journalists.)
I’m not here to run back Euro ’88, though, but instead I’m here for Scotland against Hungary and the Scots’ latest attempt to qualify from a major tournament group stage. This would be the first time they have done so in twelve attempts. That run has drained optimism from the national character. In 1978 manager
Ally MacLeod said Scotland were at the World Cup to win it. Twenty years later, Scotland went to the World Cup in France backed with an official song by Del Amitri titled Don’t Come Home Too Soon.
That attitude abides. The Scots don’t want to come home and Germany don’t want them to leave. The endless refrain among Scottish fans and whomever they meet has been “No Scotland, no party,” and such has been their impression, one local fan has started a petition calling for an annual friendly match between Germany and Scotland, to be held during Oktoberfest. Scotoberfest.
The lobby of my Stuttgart hotel is a patchwork of tartan kilts, and the receptionist betrays a tragic kind of naivety when she tells everyone checking in that the bar is open 24 hours. I bear witness to the toll of the tournament so far over the hotel breakfast on the morning of the game, as a chain of Scottish fans convulse in hacksaw coughing fits. Take an x-ray of their lungs and it might look like an aerial shot of some scarred battleground after a war.
I have to check out at 12pm and so get a train into the city centre with a group packed with – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – Scottish fans. The guy nearest me is very formally and very totally pissed. He sings a mean song about Harry Kane eating pizza with a spoon and then turns to a kid standing among adults beside him. “Yer locky t’be here wi’ yer Da, saan. Mae ex-wife didnae let ma bring mae lad,” he slurs, his eyes twinkling with the booze-repelled exhaustion that is the token of a major tournament.
He then swivels around and starts yelling at someone else that Stevie Clarke should play 4-4-2.
I’m bookending the game itself by hanging out with Scottish fans, as a colourful, diary-entry-friendly means of freshly torturing myself over Ireland’s absence. The Scots’ extraordinary capacity for drinking and good cheer, along with their songs of melancholic defiance and self-conscious acts of good will, is as close as Euro 2024 will get to the travelling Irish experience.
The sun shines in Stuttgart and I head for the vast green expanse of Schlossgarten. It’s idyllic, with clusters of Scottish fans scattered across the park, cohering around plastic crates of beer, lazily drinking. One kilted adult joins in a kids’ game of keepie-uppie, skewing his first touch and knocking a local’s coffee cup nearby. He offers a bottle of Heineken in recompense and she swigs from it. This is a beery kind of Eden.
Five minutes away Scottish fans line the steps of a building beside the Schossplatz fan zone and here the drinking is of an altogether different kind of intensity. Fans gulp from pitchers rather than just bottles, finding booze the temperature of coffee at its end.
The fan zone isn’t even showing the Scottish game, given Germany are playing Switzerland at the same time. But that will be a disaster reckoned with long into the future. Kick-off isn’t for another seven hours and time here is measured by the drink and the weight of the piss-waft drifting from the nearby portaloos.
Some passing Hungarian fans fold into the fun with chants of Fuck off England it’s never coming home but otherwise Scottish fans are running through their repertoire, most of which are a series of tributes to John McGinn, the nation’s greatest muse since Robert the Bruce.
Flower of Scotland is belted out regularly while apparent Scotland fan Alastair Campbell turns up and draws a circle around him as he plays the bagpipes. I try to think what Ireland’s Euro ’88 equivalent would have been. Probably PJ Mara playing the fiddle.
Just a tremendous pre-game energy around Stuttgart.
— Gavin Cooney (@gcooney93) June 23, 2024
Featuring Alastair Campbell playing the bagpipes @campbellclaret pic.twitter.com/gcAguJ5S3P
But it’s scenes like these that have left Euro ’88 and its subsequent iterations pressed so firmly on Irish fans’ consciousness. In the context of people’s daily lives, this is outlaw living. Sadly our hopes of striking out anytime soon look very remote. Our only realistic chance of qualifying for a tournament across the next eight years is the one we’re co-hosting.
I squeeze onto a stadium-bound train crammed with more Scots. A handful of them see a fan wearing an Argentina jersey and launch into a song about Maradona’s 1986 handball against England. A German girl in a waitress uniform looks exhausted with the noise and jostling around her.
A Scottish fan leans over and asks her, “You don’t like this?”
“No, I hate it.”
Scotland’s Ireland-at-Euro-2012 parallels are completed with a miserable performance on the pitch, meekly beaten 1-0 to go 12-for-12 in failed group stages. The post-game debriefs among Scottish fans lack any kind of intensity, largely the stuff of sombre laments about the penalty that wasn’t given and Stevie Clarke’s lack of attacking ambition.
I am not hanging around in Stuttgart, and have booked a 2.30am train back to Dusseldorf. A Scottish fan sings at the entrance to the station.
Weer th’famoos Tarthann Arhmae, an’ we cannae score a goal…weer so shyte it’s on-beh-leev-a-bell.
Deutsche-Baneful have warned me my train will have “exceptionally high demand” and I walk the length of the platform to realise its population is me and a thousand Scots, all arrayed in various states of distress and regret.
Slumped and lolling Scottish bodies are strewn along the platform resembling bodies frozen in a circle of Dante’s hell; encased in an agony they selected and then earned.
The train, remarkably, arrives on time, and everyone piles on determined to sleep, muttering with low menace about what they will do if they find their seat has been double booked.
The bar on the train is inexplicably open, and one man stumbles down to his seat in our carriage carrying a bag clinking with glass. He tells his wife he has got her a bottle of wine as he takes out a couple of beers. Here he is, then, the last Enthusiastic Scot left in Germany.
We pull away from the station and he breaks into a few refrains of No Scotland, No Party. It goes on for a couple of minutes before a yell is launched from further down the carriage. Far foock’s sake, anuff!
The party’s over.
The sun dawns to intrude on most people’s sleep, and Scottish fans drip off the train as it snakes through the Rhineland. Some are already carrying suitcases and step off at Frankfurt airport, and all are waiting for enough time to pass so Euro 2024 can be viewed selectively and in happy retrospect.
