To paraphrase the famous line from Trainspotting, it’s strange, being Scottish. The further away you are from the dear old place, the more it seems to stir the soul.
To say that spending a week in Miami gave me a new-found appreciation of Motherwell may be pushing it a bit, with the skyscrapers of downtown Brickell arguably a little more pleasing to the eye than the earthier delights of Brandon Parade in the centre of my hometown, but I have returned from my own World Cup adventure with a sense of pride, and gratitude, in being lucky enough to call myself a Scot.
I was even more fortunate to be experiencing it all with my 15-year-old son, whose unbridled passion for the national side has reignited my own. Getting there though wouldn’t be without its challenges, on a couple of fronts in particular.
First of all, while extraordinarily fortunate to do this job, bringing the trip in without the sale of a vital organ was going to require us to take a circuitous route to keep the costs down to a manageable level.
With my son being an electric wheelchair user, there was subsequently the potential for a lot to go wrong between Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Montreal and Miami, the outbound itinerary upon which we settled. If the chair went missing, or was damaged after being chucked into the hold, I didn’t much fancy giving the big man a piggyback up Ocean Drive the next day in the 35-degree heat.
Amazingly, things went swimmingly until the last leg, when a two-hour delay into our final destination meant an arrival after midnight and a missed taxi. No worries, you may think. In a major city like Miami, surely an alternative mode of transport would be readily available?
Well, something that I too overlooked until confronted with it was that services like Uber and Lyft are rarely available to disabled travellers, no matter where you are in the world. Not only does that mean that there is an added cost to using more traditional taxi services - a sort of disability tax on every trip - but if the remarkably few drivers of wheelchair cars the taxi companies have on the books have clocked off for the night, then you’re up the proverbial without a paddle.
So it was that after 20-odd hours of slogging across Europe and then the Atlantic, we found ourselves marooned outside Miami International in the still-sweltering heat - just a 20-minute drive from our hotel - for fully six hours until the morning shift came on. Still, a few choruses of ‘No Scotland, no taxi’ kept the spirits up. Nothing was going to dampen this trip - not this, nor, eventually, even the team. For now, hope hung as thickly in the air as the stifling pall from passing exhaust pipes.
Finally hitting the hay at the back of 7am local time, did we really fancy the prospect of getting up to get shifted, arranging transport once more and hotfooting it across town to South Beach for half one to join a march of bevvied up Scots under the afternoon sun? You bet your bottom dollar we did. And there are absolutely no regrets.
The atmosphere as cab driver Manuel (who became our chauffeur, and who was singing about John McGinn by the end of the week in his jolly, Cuban lilt) was, frankly, incredible. First, it was the sight of the odd retro top. A kilt here and there. A traffic cone hat. Then as the corner was turned towards Lummus Park, a sea of sweaty, scarlet Scots stretched out as far as the eye could see.
What’s more, as we made our way through the throng there were Brazilians, Colombians, locals – all here to have a party with the day’s main attraction. Towards the front, there were fire trucks with chiefs ringing their bells in time to ‘We’ll be coming down the road’, police cars with their officers hanging out the windows to high-five revellers, and an ambience as far away from the social media portrayal of how hostile American life apparently is these days as it could possibly be. The treatment of the Iranian team and support at this World Cup has been a disgraceful stain on the integrity of the tournament, but any misgivings about the sort of reception outside visitors – from our part of the world, at least – could expect were blown away by the warmth of the welcome from every Floridian we came into contact with.
As the march ended at the south end of Miami Beach, water was escaping from every orifice, whether that was from the near constant perspiration from places I was hitherto unaware you could perspire from, or the welling in the eyes caused by a chorus of Caledonia and a few cans of Modelo in the pub at the end of that golden mile. More tears would flow the following evening.
When we awoke on matchday, there was one pressing concern – namely, that we didn’t have tickets to the actual match. We had been resigned to watching from the fanzone having obsessively checked FIFA’s legalised scalping website for months waiting for the price to drop from around the $2300-a-pop mark, but having come so far, the urge to go a little further was overwhelming.
Manuel was summoned, my eejit offspring insanely donned his woollen kilt, and we set off to the stadium, more in hope than expectation that someone would be selling outside the ground, or there might be some handbacks.
Cutting a very long story short, by some miracle we managed to blag our way through security to the ticket office, where a FIFA staffer asked HQ if they could release any tickets. After what seemed an eternity, it turned out that for a pretty old penny, they could, and we were in. To our astonishment and bewilderment given the FIFA site had long shown the section as being sold out, there were only three other occupants of our particular disabled section, which held at least 15.
Regardless, whether it was the joy on my son’s face, the months of effort to get tickets only to somehow pull a couple out of the hat at the very last minute, how much they cost, the 28-year-wait or the frequent anguish that following Scotland during that time has often inspired, when the first strains of the national anthem rang out over the Hard Rock Stadium, I was gone. Full Ryan Christie in Belgrade.
In the hours after the game, amid the despair at Scotland’s overall performance in the World Cup and another major tournament that had seemed to pass us by, there were understandable feelings of disappointment and even a little anger towards Steve Clarke and more than a few of the players. After the expense, the journey, the hassle, the sacrifice – to be served up another helping of football with the handbrake applied came to feel like a slap in the face.
But in that moment, belting out Flower of Scotland through tears at a World Cup match against Brazil? There was only gratitude. And in time, I think that is what the wider feeling towards Clarke will be, even if it will also be widely accepted that the evolution of the team required a parting of the ways.
It is easy to be cynical about the Tartan Army. I’ve done it myself. When you are sitting at home, just as emotionally invested as anyone who has made the financial investment to travel to an away game or a tournament, it is hard to understand the scenes of merriment that can follow defeats that have crushed the soul.
But what I witnessed in Miami and what we all watched unfolding in Boston was more than just one long bevvy session, an outpouring of joy after a three-decade wait for World Cup football and a determination to make the most of a party that cost a fortune to attend. This was a pure expression of love for one’s country, for the national side, and - with a determination to represent their nation well - a bigger boost to Scotland’s reputation on the global stage than any politician or confected Tartan Day Parade could ever dream of achieving.
The mantra may well be No Scotland, no party, no matter the result, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who was there accepts failure or is happy to wallow in mediocrity. The post-mortem could wait, though. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the overall experience for what it was, especially when you consider what it took to get there.
Let’s hope that one day, a little sooner than 28 years into the future, we get the chance to do it all over again. Whenever that is, I’ll be there in a heartbeat. Assuming I still have one.
