Infamy, Infamy, They All 'Ad It In F' Me

TO SOME of us, it's the greatest single line in British cinema history - and to the Tartan Army, it particularly resonates today, 7 June.

For, 7 June, 1978: to quote the late American president Franklin D Roosvelt, about another date - 7 December, 1941: "A date that will live in infamy", 7 June 1978 was the day when Ally MacLeod could justifiably say: "Infamy, infamy, they all 'ad it in f' me".

Poor old Ally, as he removed his head from his hands and looked out across the Estadio Chateau Carreras in Cordoba, Argentine that sunny afternoon, in the aftermath of a World Cup clash which had ended: Scotland 1 - Iran 1, knew exactly how Julius Caesar, as portrayed by Kenneth Williams, felt as he stumbled across Shepperton Studios' re-creation of Rome's Forum.

The kid-on knife wounds Williams/Caesar supposedly endured didn't hurt, Ally carried the mental scars of the "chibbing" he took from the Tartan Army, and in particular the Lap Top Loyal Brigade thereof to his grave.

So, thanks to what poor old Ally endured after 7 June, 1978, Wee Gordon Strachan can rest assured, even if, as some of us fear - our Scotland team gets a right doing in Zagreb's Maksimir Stadion tonight, the wee ginger one will get off relatively unharmed.

He will, after all, be without several men who have become cornerstones of Scotland squads during the recent, troubled past. Wee Scott Brown, for instance, would surely have relished tonight's battle; how we long for the calming presence of skipper Darren Fletcher and, if some of the Tartan Army might be quite pleased to see Gary Caldwell missing, let's not forget the often maligned one, has been a tower of strength in more than one back-to-the-wall Scotland performance over the last decade.

The Iran game is set in stone. Ignore Scotland 0 - England 5, at Hampden, in March, 1888, the date on which Arthur Montford's grand-father first intoned the phrase: "Disaster for Scotland"; overlook Richmond 1893 and Wembley 1930: England 5 - Scotland 2 on both occasions; wipe from our collective consciousness Wembley 1955 and 1961: England 7 - Scotland 2, then, England 9 - Scotland 3; fail to recall Austria 5 Scotland 0, or Austria 4 - Scotland 0, in Vienna in 1931 and 1951.

At least, when Scotland suffered these thumpings, we lost to good teams. But ONLY drawing with Iran, that result will forever be seen as the pits of Scottish football ineptitude. That wasn't supposed to happen. We were gonnae shake them up, when we won the World Cup, fur, Scotland is the greatest football team.

At least, back 35 years ago, we still had players like Archie Gemmill who had the chutzpah to go out again four days later and score one of the great solo goals of all time and inspire the narrowest of wins over one of the two best teams in the world.

Can we honestly see a Gemmill for the 21st century in Strachan's squad?

We will, most-likely, lose tonight; we know this, we can accept this - for this is where Scottish football is today. We are an irrelevance, make-weights in our World Cup qualifying group. This is the spot to which the befuddled blazers of Hampden's sixth floor corridors of power have led us.

This is the legacy of Graeme Souness's belief - when he arrived to take up the post of Rangers' manager in the summer of 1986: that there wasn't another Scottish player then active fit to lace his boots - so Rangers would virtually ignore Scottish talent and import from abroad; thereby sparking-off an  "Import  or stagnate" recruitment process which, 27-years down the line, has seen us indeed stagnate and is only now, at an almost evolutionary pace, being reversed

Or, if we believe in miracles, we will hope that Leigh Griffiths, or Steven Naismith can, from somewhere, conjure-up the the individual skills of Gemmill, or Cooper, or Eddie Gray - the three men who scored the greatest individual goals ever scored by Scotsmen and bring down the Croats.

Aye, when you sign-on for the Tartan Army, you sign on for a life-time on the roller-coaster of football emotions.

That, and having the English for neighbours, is the price we pay for being born as one of the greatest wee people God ever put breath into, in the Greatest Wee Country On The Planet.