"Maggie, Maggie, get tae f---!"

[asylumseeker]

Margaret Thatcher was the guest of honour at the Scottish Cup final in 1988, a designation conferred by the Scottish Football Association but manifestly not by the 75,000 crowd, who greeted her appearance with a mass display of giant red cards, while singing “Maggie, Maggie, get tae f---!” as Sir Malcolm Rifkind – at that time Secretary of State for Scotland – murmured sweet nothings in his boss’s ear in a colossally hopeless attempt to shield her from the racket.


Will Scotland stay or go? Downing Street has been invested and exercised in the days leading up to the referendum. What's it going to be? Independence or not?

Fergie and Moyes are voting to stay. Last time that happened ...


MODS please move to football side, if more fitting there.

[asylumseeker]

Soccer Fans Supply Strong Voice in Scottish Independence Debate

GLASGOW — In this city defined by the rivalry between its two biggest soccer clubs — Celtic and Rangers — there were no team colors on display Sunday night as fans filtered into a gloomy pub to watch Scotland play Germany in its first qualifying game for the 2016 European Championship. There is, however, more than soccer to talk about at the moment.

Scotland is wound tight, waiting to uncoil next week, when the country will vote on whether it should be independent from Britain. The debate has generated the kind of tension and engagement usually reserved for soccer rivalries in Scotland, and in fact the country’s stadiums have become key battlegrounds for the yes and no campaigns.

And as is so often the case in Scotland, the rivals Rangers and Celtic, collectively known as the Old Firm, are dominating the outlook. To the surprise of no one, they seem to be, as with most things, on opposite sides.

Traditionally, Rangers is as British as afternoon tea or “Downton Abbey.” The club’s symbol is the Union Jack. It hosts an annual Armed Forces Day. It toasts the British monarch before its first home game each year. A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II even hangs in the dressing room at Ibrox Stadium.

At a league game this month, a section of Rangers fans unfurled a large banner urging their fellow supporters to “Vote No.” Given the team’s history, preservation of the union would appear, at least on the face of it, intertwined with the preservation of Rangers’ identity as a club.

“A lot of fans adopt that identity in a very tribal way,” said Alan Bissett, an editor of the book “Born Under a Union Flag,” whose contributors examine the bond between Rangers and Britain. “At surface level it seems to be the case that the majority of Rangers fans will be voting no. Those fans are using the vote as a way to express and hold on to their identity. They may feel that their identity is under threat if the union falls apart.”

Celtic’s relationship to the independence debate is more complex. Sections of the club’s supporters identify with the Irish Republican movement, making them — in simplified terms — prime independence advocates. But others are skeptical of the Scottish National Party and its leader, Alex Salmond, since the introduction of the Offensive Behavior Act, which has restricted — at least in the view of some Celtic fans — the expression of the club’s Irish heritage.

Yet the yes campaign has taken root among the Celtic fan base. The Radical Independence Campaign, a volunteer-led civilian organization supporting a break with Britain, has even used home games at Celtic Park to draw attention to its cause. At a recent league match against Dundee United, a contingent of about 1,000 Celtic fans held up yes placards in the 18th minute, a symbolic nod to the date of the vote, Sept. 18.

“We wanted to send out a message from Celtic Park, and nothing influences opinion like a football club,” said Tony Kenny, who helped coordinate the R.I.C. campaign at the stadium. “At Celtic you have a lot of people who are anti-establishment and who have never been comfortable with the British identity. For us it’s fertile ground, with a lot of people who are ripe for being pro-independence.”

It is not just Celtic and Rangers being used to amplify the campaigns; last month’s Edinburgh derby between Hearts and Hibernian was also targeted by the R.I.C.

With the outcome still in doubt with only days to go, and with financial markets hedging against a possible yes victory, Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, and other leading politicians visited Scotland this week to warn Scots about the consequences of the vote. But soccer still lends a strong voice to the discussion.

“There is an element in football which will jump on any bandwagon and convert it into what they think it is all about,” said the announcer Archie Macpherson, the voice of Scottish soccer for about 30 years.

While active players have remained largely silent in the debate, on Saturday 16 renowned Scottish soccer figures, including Ally McCoist, Billy McNeill and David Moyes, declared their support for the no campaign by signing a joint statement that called on “every patriotic Scot to help maintain Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom, which has served Scotland so well.”

Even Alex Ferguson, a former Manchester United manager and one of Scotland’s most recognizable sports figures, has made public his allegiance, donating to the Better Together campaign, which is seeking a no vote.

The return of league matches to stadiums across Scotland this weekend will give both sides a final chance to make their pitches. But soccer’s innate capacity for political demonstration has already had an effect.

“It’s about creating an atmosphere, and that’s what is happening at football grounds because there’s already an atmosphere there to latch on to,” Macpherson said. “They’ve used football fans for the vocal power they need.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/sports/soccer/Celtic-rangers-soccer-fans-supply-strong-voice-in-scottish-independence-debate.html?_r=0

[asylumseeker]

Scottish football an unlikely oasis of calm as independence referendum debate rages

Of all the results I have covered as a Scottish football correspondent, none remotely compares in importance with the outcome of the contest currently being waged for hearts and minds across the Scotland.

Now, Scottish football has operated as an independent entity for 142 years – arguably the single most obvious example of Scotland having a distinct identity on the international scene, so history would suggest it was inevitable to find a headline which read: “Soccer Fans Supply Strong Voice in Scottish Independence Debate” – except perhaps that it appeared in the New York Times.

According to the newspaper: “The debate has generated the kind of tension and engagement usually reserved for soccer rivalries in Scotland and in fact the country’s stadiums have become key battlegrounds for the yes and no campaigns.”

Oh, really?

In fact, one remarkable feature of the referendum campaign is how negligible a part football has played. Yes, there have been occasional references, one being seen at Parkhead during last weekend’s game between Celtic and Aberdeen when there was a chant of “Stand up if you’re voting Yes”.

Some stood, some did not and, as with the opinion polls, it was impossible to come to any conclusion about what might happen when the ballots are cast. Indeed, Celtic fan message boards – in so far as they have discussed the matter at all – have been split about whether or not the demonstration was appropriate at a match.

A large banner featuring the Union flag alongside the Scottish Saltire has appeared at Ibrox – a stadium that is “as British as afternoon tea or Downton Abbey”, as the New York Times has it – urging a No vote. Even then, matters seem not to be as clear as would otherwise have been expected, with a Panelbase snapshot poll of fans as far back as May reporting that 48 per cent of Celtic fans would vote Yes and 40 per cent No, while Rangers were at 45 per cent Yes to 41 per cent No. The most overwhelmingly Unionist club was St Johnstone at 94 per cent for No – again surprisingly because the local MP is the vocal Pete Wishart of the SNP. By and large, though, politicians have kept clear of Scottish football clubs and the clubs have stayed shy of the debate. But it was not always so.

Margaret Thatcher was the guest of honour at the Scottish Cup final in 1988, a designation conferred by the Scottish Football Association but manifestly not by the 75,000 crowd, who greeted her appearance with a mass display of giant red cards, while singing “Maggie, Maggie, get tae f---!” as Sir Malcolm Rifkind – at that time Secretary of State for Scotland – murmured sweet nothings in his boss’s ear in a colossally hopeless attempt to shield her from the racket.

“I had a very good day in Scotland,” she declared at Prime Minister’s Question Time the following week, in reply to a sardonic query from a bloke you might have heard of – name of Salmond, anyone?

This wasn’t just a case of football passions spilling into the political arena. Thatcher had been a keen proponent in Cabinet of a scheme to impose identity cards on English football fans as part of a crackdown on hooliganism. On the day he died in September 1985, Jock Stein told me – in the last interview he would ever give – that he was fretting that the Prime Minister was looking for an excuse to intervene in the Scottish game, too.

She had, it was widely believed, privately urged the ban on Scotland from playing England at Wembley in the scheduled Auld Enemies clash of the Home Championship in 1985, when the game was relocated to Hampden Park. She had, it must be said, cause to argue that the Scots seemed to bear down on London with much the same emotions of a Viking longboat crew on first sight of Lindisfarne.

The Tartan Army had, after all, departed with most of the Wembley pitch and crossbars in 1977 and the game in 1979 – when 349 were arrested and 144 ejected for drunkenness – was followed by more mass unruliness in 1981 and 1983. At the time of the 1977 depredations, it was widely said that Scottish sentiment had been inflamed by the SNP’s rise to prominence under the banner of “It’s Scotland’s Oil”.

But once again, the current circumstances suggest that, if the theory was true at the time, it has long since become inapplicable. The independence campaign did not truly compel attention in England until an opinion poll put Yes ahead, but it has been a dynamic in Scottish public life for some time – yet when England played Scotland at Wembley last year, the occasion lived up to its billing as a friendly, with only two arrests inside the stadium.

And, yes, some eminent football names have been selected to advise that they support attachment to the Union, including Sir Alex Ferguson, Billy McNeill, Walter Smith and – bless – David Beckham. One or two, such as Steve Archibald, have come out for independence.

However, their utterances have scarcely been noticed amid the din of the most electrifying political debate seen in Scotland for three centuries. For once, Scotland’s football grounds are places where you might be afforded a brief respite from the roar of argument all around.

No matter who is ahead when the final whistle sounds on this epochal referendum, it will certainly not be football wot won – or lost – it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/scottish-football/11103102/Scottish-football-an-unlikely-oasis-of-calm-as-independence-referendum-debate-rages.html

[asylumseeker]

Scottish independence referendum: Sport in Scotland shows the Union at its best. So why has no one said so?

The streets of Edinburgh were filled with men wearing Rangers shirts last Saturday. The team were not playing in the city, the fans were turning out instead to cheer on the Orange Order’s pro-Union march through the capital. There to admire the marching bands, the banners and the sashes, the last thing they seemed to want to talk about was the sinking fortunes of their club.

“Don’t get me started,” said one man, when I asked him about it. “It’s not exactly great is it?” He was right about that. Rangers, assailed by financial issues, are stuttering and stumbling headlong towards another downward spiral. The monetary shock of being stripped of the opportunity to play in the Scottish Premier League – and thus missing out on the major cash-generating fixture of any season – has been catastrophic.

There is a serious possibility that the club’s rise from its humiliating demotion to the bottom of the pile will be compromised by another lurch into administration. No wonder that among those waving their Union flags nobody was anxious to talk about the football.

And the Rangers-supporting Orangemen are not the only ones currently engaged in football purdah. As the country broils in political debate, there has been a sizeable gap where there might have been a discussion about what sort of sporting future might lie ahead.

It is true that despite the many claims from the pro-independence lobby about the nirvana that will be created by initiating divorce from the UK, no one is suggesting that a free Scotland would be a good bet for the Rugby World Cup in 2015, or that Celtic will be inspired to go on and win next season’s Champions League.

No one is publicly relishing the idea of a future in which the London press will no longer be able to describe Andy Murray as British when he wins and Scottish when he loses. Rather, what might happen to sport in their vision of Scotland is never mentioned by the Yes side.

But oddly, few from the Better Together campaign side are talking about it either. A group of old footballers and former rugby internationals did come together to fly the Union flag. But their presence was more to do with sprinkling a little stardust on the proceedings (if Jim Leighton, Murdo MacLeod and Barry Ferguson can be described as the providers of star dust) than furthering the argument.

Yet, never mind all the alarmist stuff about bank flight and currency uncertainty, sport offers the most positive message the No campaign could offer. It should have been shouted from the roof tops of Edinburgh: the history of sport in Scotland is the best evidence of how successfully the Union has worked.

Because it is in sport that the country has long been operating a sort of devo-max, free to forge its own identity, while benefiting from the opportunities for wider cooperation available in partnership. Take football. If Scotland wakes up on Friday an independent country, there would be no need, as happened when Yugoslavia broke up or when the Soviet empire disintegrated, for a new team to be admitted into Fifa: Scotland shares with England the distinction of being the oldest international side in the game.

Wholly separate from London from the start, the Scottish Football Association has been a model of devolution. For sure, the directors of Celtic and Rangers might look enviously at the wealth generated by their southern neighbours and would like nothing more than an invitation to form a union with the Premier League. But Scotland has always had its own hierarchy and attachments, its own way of doing things.

It is the same in rugby. What is now the Six Nations is the oldest international competition, from its beginnings giving an annual opportunity for the swell of national pride. Like football, in rugby Scotland’s sense of itself has never been smothered by its political affiliation with the rest of the UK.

Scots might jokingly suggest they would rather anyone win than England, but unlike the Catalans or the Croatians, they never had their identity on the sporting field diminished by wider association. They were never obliged to turn out in someone else’s colours.

But for many of those involved in individual pursuits, their advance was facilitated by partnership. From Launceston Elliot, who won gold in the one-handed weightlifting at the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens, through Eric Liddell, Dick McTaggart, David Wilkie, Allan Wells and Shirley Robertson, to Sir Chris Hoy and Katherine Grainger, Scots have always been disproportionately effective contributors to Great Britain’s Olympic medal tally.

Hoy himself has pointed out that he would never have achieved what he did without the benefits that came from the Union: being part of the British cycling team – the Lottery funding, the training facilities, the agglomeration of expertise in coaching and sports medicine – enabled him to do what he did.

Yet simple issues like the future of Lottery funding for Scottish sports people have been entirely ignored by the Yes side, presumably bundled up with all the other areas that will need to be negotiated.

What sport shows is that there is no need to negotiate anything. Ever since sport was first codified, Scotland has been in the happy position of enjoying the best of both worlds: free to do its own thing while able to tap into unity when required.

There can be no denying that will change in the event of a Yes vote: it is impossible to separate from the United Kingdom without stepping away from the wholly beneficial sporting partnership. That is the truth of it. Oddly, nobody in Scotland considers it of sufficient significance to talk about.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/11102253/Scottish-independence-referendum-Sport-in-Scotland-shows-the-Union-at-its-best.-So-why-has-no-one-said-so.html

[asylumseeker]

Independence referendum: Yes vote would kill Celtic dream of Premier League place stone dead, says sportswriter Oliver Hol

AMID the many complexities of the Scottish referendum, football is playing its part.

There are some opinions in Scotland that are decided by whether you support Celtic or Rangers.

Many are suggesting that the independence vote is little different.

Rangers supporters, with their loyalist roots, are broadly ‘no’.

Celtic, with their fiercely republican traditions, are widely thought to favour the ‘yes’ vote.

But Celtic fans also face a dilemma because they know that if the country decides on independence, a different dream will die.

For many years, some among the Celtic support have lobbied for the club to join the English leagues.

Their desire extends to a readiness to begin their journey in English football in League One or League Two and work their way up.

Their ambition is based on the perception that Scottish domestic football has become moribund and is holding them back.

Since Rangers’ fall from grace, the problem has become more acute and the Scottish Premiership has effectively become a one-team league.

Celtic’s escape route is to migrate south of the border and play against the giants of the Premier League.

Such a move would transform the club’s earning power from new television revenues.

With its fanatical support, a move south would be its passport to competing with the best of Europe’s sides on a more even basis.

There are plenty of obstacles to the move, including objections from English clubs who would fear they might be the one to make way for Celtic and Rangers.

And there are objections from Scotland, too. How viable would a Scottish league be if it was denuded of the clubs known as the Old Firm?

But as things stand, there is still a possibility that the move south might happen, that minds might be changed, that television companies might start to push hard for the change.

If Scotland votes ‘yes’, though, that dream will be killed stone dead overnight.

If Scotland becomes an independent country, Celtic and Rangers will be trapped north of the border with no hope of a move.

The idea of them one day being able to attract the game’s biggest stars will fade to nothing.

And the situation that exists now, where the limit of Celtic’s ambition is to qualify for the group stage of the Champions League, will be set indefinitely.

As they prepare to cast their votes, it’s something for Celtic fans to ponder.

Source: Daily Record

[asylumseeker]

Scottish independence: What might it mean for sport?

If homeowners displaying campaign posters in their windows was a sport, Scotland's "yes" campaign appears to be leading the "no" team 4-0 with three minutes to play.

That was certainly the impression in Glasgow's West End last weekend, where the tightness of the polls and no-minded leanings of the bookmakers were not borne out by my less scientific methods.

Of course, to continue the football metaphor, there is a big difference between winning the pre-match singsong and claiming the points.

The situation is very different in the realm of Olympic and Paralympic sport, where it has been difficult this week to find athletes, coaches or administrators willing to nail their Saltire to the mast.

That is not to say they do not exist, it is just that with Rio 2016 less than two years away they are more reluctant to swap the certainties of the union for the promise of independence than many of their compatriots.

The all-encompassing significance of Thursday's referendum has been well-documented elsewhere, and it would be silly to pretend sport is a key factor in the debate. Compared to the currency, jobs, the price of food, Scotland's place in the world and Strictly Come Dancing  , the games people play is small beer. But that does not mean it does not matter.

 Anybody who has witnessed an England-Scotland football or rugby union match will know how sport has provided an outlet for Scottish national identity for decades, just as Andy Murray helps demonstrate how much a small but resourceful nation can achieve in the world.

But those are examples of sporting particularism that Thursday's vote will not affect.

Scottish football is already proudly independent, as is rugby.

Equally, golf's Open will continue to be played on courses around the British Isles, just as Scottish golfers will strive to play in the Ryder Cup.

Murray's case, however, gets closer to the real issue for sport in an independent Scotland: as an individual trying to win tournaments, no change; as an Olympian trying to win a medal…well, he will be wearing different kit next time, as he would on Davis Cup duty.

For a wealthy athlete in an individual sport that is probably as far as independence will go in terms of impact. That would not be the case for most athletes in any Scottish Olympic or Paralympic team at Rio 2016, Pyeongchang 2018 or Tokyo 2020.

 There are 136 sportsmen and sportswomen who describe themselves as Scottish among the 1272 athletes funded by UK Sport's "World Class Performance Programme" - 10.7% of the total - and two thirds of Scotland's Commonwealth medallists this summer were nurtured in this way.

Much has been said about the pros and cons of the joint venture brought about by the Acts of Union 307 years ago, but nobody can deny the impact UK Sport has had since 1997. National Lottery cash, targeted at winners, has seen Team GB vault up the medal tables.

Scottish athletes have contributed hugely towards this, helping to win 13 of the 65 Olympic medals Team GB claimed at London 2012.

But only three of those medals were wholly Scottish: Murray's tennis gold, Sir Chris Hoy's keirin gold and Michael Jamieson's breaststroke silver. Would Scotland win many of those other medals on its own? Would the Scotland-less Team GB?

Speaking to Sky News  in July, UK Sport's chief executive Liz Nicholl put it bluntly: "Certainly to start with Scottish athletes would win fewer medals if they were outside the British high-performance system, and Team GB would win fewer medals as a result of losing that Scottish expertise."

It is a point the likes of Scottish 800m star Lynsey Sharp and badminton player Imogen Bankier have made, too.

Sharp, a Commonwealth and European silver medallist this summer, told BBC Scotland she was worried about the implications of independence because she spent most of her time at Loughborough University, a place transformed by UK Sport money into a world-leading sports science centre.

If Scotland is able to do that why hasn't it done it already?" asked Sharp.

"We can tap into the English system and be part of Team GB when it suits us and use it to our advantage," said Bankier last year. "Independence would mean we would lose that."

These views sound very familiar to James Allen from the Sport and Recreation Alliance (SRA), an umbrella group that represents more than 320 governing bodies throughout the UK.

Allen, the SRA's head of policy, told me there was "huge uncertainty" among his members about the impact of a "yes" vote on facilities and elite funding.

The pro-independence campaign has been light on details as to how the change from a UK model to a Scottish one will happen. It has simply stated it will be negotiated, like everything else, in the proposed 18-month transition period ahead of Independence Day on 24 March, 2016.

Allen acknowledged that an independent Scotland would meet the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) two criteria for recognition - membership of the United Nations, and having at least five national sports bodies recognised by their respective international federations - he just doubts it is a given in time for Rio.

This issue was studied by a working group of experts appointed by the Scottish Parliament's sports minister Shona Robison.

Chaired by the former First Minister Henry McLeish, the group's report   cited the recent examples of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Montenegro as newly independent states that gained Olympic and Paralympic status "in a very tight timescale".

With 11 governing bodies already "directly linked" to federations and early dialogue between the new Scottish government and the Olympic and Paralympic authorities, the report said there are "no obvious or major barriers to securing accreditation".

 Others, however, wonder if there will be time to achieve all this by July 2016, when qualification for Rio closes.

If the timetable does slip - and other countries with similar tensions, such as Spain, would be happy for it to do so - Scottish athletes would have the choice of joining Team GB again, or competing under the Olympic Flag, as athletes from East Timor, Macedonia and South Sudan have done at recent Games.

But none of this is as complicated as the issue of funding.

Even McLeish's report, which was published in May, admitted it had been unable to properly "consider how an independent Scotland could develop transitional arrangements" from the UK Sport model, which will distribute £350m in the build-up to Rio, with a further £31m on winter sport for 2018.

Most of this money, 60%, comes from the National Lottery, with the rest coming from general taxation. As things stand, there is no road map for how a unified Scottish funding body will get its hands on "its" share of the cash. The working group could only say that Scottish athletes should be funded at least as well as they currently are, wherever they wish to train, although this could result in additional start-up costs.

 The report's findings were based on 23 responses from sporting bodies and individuals. But they did not consult former British Amateur Boxing Association chairman Derek Mapp.

Despite securing record funding for the sport on the back of five medals in London, Mapp was removed from his post last year when what he describes as "parochial rivalries" took hold of the sport.

"The Scots in particular were obsessed with national pride," said Mapp, who set up an elite training base in Sheffield.

"But they forgot what's best for the athletes. If you spread the cake too thinly you won't get the best, and if you're not careful you can quickly become second-class."

Mapp based his GB Boxing model on British Cycling's much-admired approach in Manchester, so it was hardly surprising to read Sir Dave Brailsford's view on Scottish independence  .

"UK sport is one of the best things this country has and it is all possible because we can share talent, resources and ideas," Brailsford said on Monday.

"My message to friends in Scotland is simple: it is for you to decide your own future but for the sake of UK sport I hope you vote 'no'."

This all comes as no surprise to Sir Craig Reedie.

A badminton champion from Stirling, Reedie is a former president of the International Badminton Federation, an ex-chairman of the British Olympic Association and a member of the IOC's executive board.

"In my experience athletes tend to follow the funding," Reedie told me.

"So I'm not at all surprised to hear that people are worried about the uncertainty that would follow a 'yes'."

 It is customary in BBC features to try and find a neutral position by balancing the voices on one side of the argument, with voices from the other. I have struggled to find them for this piece from within Olympic or Paralympic sport.

But as I mentioned towards the start, that does not mean they do not exist. They do, as Scottish swimmer Dan Wallace memorably demonstrated when he channelled Mel Gibson   by crying "For Freedom!" after winning the 400m individual medley in Glasgow two months ago.

Although he later played down his actions on Twitter, Wallace was asked after the race  whether he would follow the "route to freedom". "Yeah," he replied. "Definitely."

It should also be remembered that curling is a Team GB operation made solely in Scotland, and that it delivered three Olympic and Paralympic medals at Sochi 2014.

And there is much in McLeish's report on how a "reprioritised" sports strategy could lead to a fairer, happier and healthier Scotland in the future. Even the SRA's Allen admits existing Scottish policies on access to sport and recreation are "more progressive" than elsewhere in the UK.

Ultimately, sport is all about overcoming obstacles, not accepting mediocrity, striving to be better, which is basically the conversation I overhead in Glasgow last weekend. Whether Scottish sport can achieve that best on its own, or as part of a team, is just one of the many talking points in what has already been a remarkable debate.

Source: BBC

http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/29234259

[asylumseeker]

Scottish football's independence has already effectively been declared

The debate about Scottish independence has been clattering away in the background for some time but with the vote now just six months away the noises off seem to have ratcheted up a level this week, transformed from a vague burble of hectoring anxieties into what can only be described as a slightly louder burble of hectoring anxieties.

Particularly striking was the news that David Cameron had let out "a little cry of joy" while watching David Bowie's acceptance message at the Brit awards last week, when the Thin White Duke lectured via his proxy an audience of cocaine-fuelled music industry hangers-on about the overriding cultural importance of Scotland remaining part of the historic union.

It is easy to picture the reaction to this in the prime ministerial quarters. The sudden cocking of the head. The rustle of monogrammed pyjama. The quivering upper lip. The single hank of hair falling across that clammy dome. And finally, in a reverie of snow-white alien pop god androgyny striding across the Tory blue re-election stage in spangled Tartan hot-pants, the little cry of joy, the retreat into moody silence, the half hour in the Chesterfield recliner listening to the Little Drummer Boy (feat Bing Crosby).

This is a very important issue and there are clearly plenty of English people who do feel a distinct cultural connection with Scotland – even a select class who tend to own large parts of it and see the Highlands in particular as a kind of rambling ancestral back garden tended by whisky-soaked tenant farmers. But for many southerners the relationship with Scotland is, out of a combination of ignorance and distance, often quite vague. It is a relationship that has in the last few decades been defined most obviously by sport; and above all – with all due apologies to everyone concerned – by football.

The Scotification of English football goes back right to the start of things, a beautifully fertile process so deeply ingrained it could be argued there has never actually been a purely English club game at any stage. Instead, pretty much every significant English club football triumph has had a Scottish tinge, from the early "Scotch Professors" who transformed the FA's primitive dribbler's blueprint into the combination game that is the basis of all modern football to the gaggles of ball-playing inside-forwards flushed from the Highland undergrowth by lasso-wielding speculator-agents to staff the newly booming southern leagues.

Indeed in the past 25 years, the English top tier has been won 18 times by three different Scottish managers and just once by an Englishman. And yet this is a relationship where independence has already effectively been declared.

The disappearance of Scottish players and – yes, they're coming for you too – Scottish managers from England's top division is one of the unremarked slow-motion footballing tragedies of the past 20 years. This week the current round of Champions League ties passed its midway point with four English clubs involved and just one Scottish player, Darren Fletcher, available to them. This in itself seems poignant given the gloriously defining role Scotsmen have played in so many of English club football's best moments overseas.

The years when English clubs dominated the old European Cup were essentially an Anglo‑Scottish pact of iron, with at least three Scots in each of the Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa teams that won it six seasons out of eight between 1978 and 1984. This was the real golden age of the Anglo-Scots club game, a period when not only did Scotland produce the only genuinely brilliant football film ever made (Gregory's Girl, naturally) but tough, inventive, alluringly distinctive Scottish footballers just seemed to fall from the skies like ripe autumn fruit.

There was a majesty to that generation of tight‑shorted, skinny-legged Scots, a marriage of wiry power and grace in a player such as Alan Hansen, who didn't really look like a footballer at all but resembled instead some baleful, sardonic long-striding, new-romantic android warrior.

There were brilliant Scots everywhere, from Archie Gemmill, a small, galloping nodule of footballing gristle; to the mooching, dreamy Steve Archibald, who carried with him the air of a languid and cosseted sixth form poet; to Graeme Souness, the best kind of surprisingly sensitive terrifyingly angry hard man, the kind of surprisingly sensitive terrifyingly angry hard man who looks like he might insist on sitting you down and explaining exactly why it's necessary to stamp his great thick stumpy little hatchet-man's boot down on your ankle, doing it so eloquently and persuasively and with so many thrillingly enjoyable finger-stabs to the solar plexus that by the end you're practically begging him to get on with it.

And yet somehow all this fine-point talent has disappeared. By all accounts the problems in Scottish football are pretty much the same as those facing English football, just on a more annihilating scale: wider societal habits, lack of resources, clubs who buy in rather than train up, and a cycle of apparently irreversible hierarchical waste. In the end Scotland's decline just looks like another part of the wider falling away of the traditional northern European game, a concussive, mud-bound kind of footballing beauty that has no place in what is basically a summer sport now, dominated by more refined and systematic nations.

Independence for Scotland may or may not come about – and there were even some weird political nuances in the unveiling this week of the national teams's new away kit in the racing colours of the Earl of Rosebery, Old Etonian prime minister and a staunch opponent of Irish independence in his time, an act of subtextual football kit politics that might even have drawn yet another little gasp of joy No10 Downing Street.

But whichever way this ends up going, one thing is certain. We will always have football, an indissoluble shared Anglo-Scottish sporting history, and that brief glorious period when together we were kings.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/feb/28/scottish-football-independence-declared

[asylumseeker]

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/sep/16/11-sporting-questions-scotland-independence

[asylumseeker]

Scottish football heroes targeted by their own fans after coming out against independence

Football stars including Alan Hansen, Ally McCoist and David Moyes have been targeted by their own supporters after coming out in favour of the union.

Sixteen of Scotland's greatest ever footballers as well as managers Billy McNeill and Walter Smith released a statement today calling for people to reject the independence proposals on September 18. 

One Tweet attacking former BBC pundit Alan Hansen even published a photograph of his house on Merseyside.   

The team, which includes 16 players from the 1960s to the 2000s and former Old Firm managers Billy McNeill and Walter Smith issued a joint statement through the Better Together organisation.

They said: 'We are proud Scots who have been proud to represent our country around the world. When Scotland calls, we answer.

'We are proud that Scotland has always stood on its own two feet but we also believe that Scotland stands taller because we are part of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a country Scotland helped to build.

'We urge every patriotic Scot to help maintain Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom which has served Scotland so well.'

The intervention of the high profile footballers has not been welcomed by people promoting a Yes vote.
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2745996/Alan-Hansen-leads-squad-Scottish-football-legends-including-Denis-Law-Ally-McCoist-backing-No-vote-independence-referendum.html#ixzz3DfBtR6xN

[weary1969]

So I asked Dog if he voting and he said yes. I wonder what is his vote?

[asylumseeker]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-independence/11108124/Scotland-overwhelmingly-rejects-independence.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/scotland-votes/article20653311/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/europe/scotland-independence-vote-no.html?ref=world

[ribbit]

rant from trainspotting:

It's SHITE being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the f*cking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We're ruled by effete arseholes. It's a SHITE state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and ALL the fresh air in the world won't make any f*cking difference!