100 days and counting: I'm resuming my World Cup odyssey - and this time I have perfect company
Memories are flooding back as World Cup fever grips for this correspondent
As I remember it, the call came through on the phone pinned to a carrel in the old Wimbledon press centre. Yes, a landline, which helps date the moment to sometime last century. A colleague had returned home from France to cover Rangers on tour.
A vacancy had opened to cover what remained of the World Cup. “Would you like to …” Before my sports editor finished the sentence, the phone was left dangling by its cord – and I’d left SW19 in a cloud of dust. I was on the way across the Channel.
Just weeks after starting at The Scotsman, I was off to a World Cup. I thought it would always be like this. Every four years. On the march with whoever’s army, laptop in hand.
Scotland did not qualify again, of course, until a night of nights late last year to seal a place at this summer’s tournament, which is now just 100 days away. The Scotsman is kicking off a World Cup series aiming to reflect that, for the first time in a long time, Scotland is not on the outside looking in.
It was certainly not advisable for any ambitious young reporter to hitch their career prospects to Scotland’s wagon in the late 1990s. Veteran journalists enjoyed pouring tales of Italia 90, Mexico ’86 and the rest into the ears of their younger colleagues. Seeing Scotland again at a World Cup seemed more and more like a pipe dream, although when I received that call to drop everything, strawberries and cream included, and head to France, I had actually only just returned. I’d been given the green light to attend Scotland v Morocco as a fan, so had lost my seeing Scotland-at-a-World Cup virginity at the tender age of 25.
The earth might not have moved but the sky certainly caved in. I am not sure I have seen the goals again since that night in St Etienne’s Stade Geoffroy-Guichard.
I have vague memories of Jim Leighton’s outstretched hands as another shot eludes him. Little did I know when I left the stadium that night that I’d be back there for the next match held there. And what a match. England v Argentina. Michael Owen’s wonder goal and David Beckham felling Diego Simeone with an injudicious leg flick. They are sure to be included when those 100 World Cup moments countdown shows roll around in the coming weeks and months.
What a privilege it was to be there. Although having just re-read my match report, I realise that, like Beckham, I wilted under the pressure in a stadium dubbed the Cauldron by locals.
But while he went home, I stayed on. I got another chance. As far as I am aware, there were no effigies of me strung up in bars back home, Beckham’s sad fate. Too young and foolish to keep a diary, it’s fortunate I can consult back issues of The Scotsman to plot how my first World Cup unfolded. Frighteningly, memory has become less reliable than it once was. Next on the schedule was Germany v Croatia although strangely what I remember most about that day is catching the end of the Argentina v Netherlands game in a hotel lobby in Lyon and watching open mouthed as Dennis Bergkamp scored that exquisite winner after bringing down Frank de Boer’s long ball out of defence. Another '100 moments' staple we will enjoy revisiting.
Back in Paris—at least I think it was Paris—there was an invite to appear on a show on one of those chaotic cable channel shows in vogue at the time. It was presented by Brendan Coogan, brother of Steve, and I was a guest along with....slinky belly dancer from Morocco. They were different times.
The unforgettable Ronaldo moment
Different times, too, at the final, where I sat near Brian Glanville, the doyen of English football writers. He had a stentorian voice on the page as well as in person, and he was still clattering out copy on a typewriter. Everyone was clattering out words on whatever they could find when the team sheets were initially distributed and on which Ronaldo’s name was a glaring absence. New team sheets were eventually issued with Ronaldo’s name reinserted after he had supposedly recovered from an apparent fit pre-match.
I recently watched a clip on X of John Motson trying his best to fathom what was going while sitting next to co-commentator Trevor Brooking. It feels like it is from another world ago. Motson still looks young and it’s strange to think that somewhere in that media tribune, perhaps not too far away, I was sitting away trying my best to similarly make sense of it all. I do hope I still have that original, Ronaldo-less team sheet somewhere.
What I know I do have is a suitcase full of ephemera from Korea and Japan four years later that I will one day – perhaps before this summer – sort into some kind of order. Ticket stubs, receipts – note to self, check the Scotsman’s latest timeframe policy for claiming back expenses – and one measly photograph. I bought myself a new camera just before the tournament. However, the relentless workload while chasing a midnight moon around South Korea and Japan combined with the mental strain of getting to and fro places where the signs were written in letters you couldn’t decipher, let alone read, meant snapping happy images fell low on the list of priorities. I also had to worry about lugging around a brick-sized satellite phone, which the small print advised was unsuitable for built-up areas. Kind of ruled out Toyko, then. Thanks IT dept.
Another challenge: a time difference that meant deadlines stretched into the night and resulted in daily battles with that familiar human failing of procrastination. Inadvisedly using the time available to write rather than sleep stored up problems when you were expected to attend press conferences bright and early the following day. The frazzled sleeplessness simply intensified the sense of discombobulation abounding on a five-week trip that, ironically, feels more and more like a dream now.
But what experiences, among them being invited to dinner at the Tokyo home of the Japanese translator of Roddy Doyle’s books (whom I had met on a bus in South Korea). I recall inelegantly folding my six-foot plus frame beneath a kotatsu, one of those low wooden Japanese tables. Another dinner date was spent with millions-selling author Bill Bryson, there chronicling events for The Times, along with two Scottish colleagues, Graham Spiers and Hugh Keevins.
But what of the football I hear you cry? Argentina v England, Beckham’s redemption, beneath a roof on the island of Hokkaido sticks out, as does South Korea v Italy in Daejeon in the nosiest ground I have experienced. Although it produced a pleasing redemptive narrative, the Yokohama final—where Ronaldo scored twice against Germany to banish the blues of four years earlier—was a bit of a let-down.
A dozen years elapsed before Brazil 2014. With Scotland’s absence taken as read by now, it nevertheless stung that I’d be heading to a World Cup in football’s spiritual homeland without the Scotland international team, from what many regard as a birthplace of football, for company. Instead my brief were Spain, reigning World Cup champions and who were duly eliminated by the time of their third, dead rubber game v Australia. So too were England, the other team on my itinerary. I watched Roy Hodgson's side come unstuck v Italy in a fascinating clash of traditional European football powers in a stadium built on a clearing hacked out of the Amazon rainforest.
These exits left me free to pursue perhaps more idiosyncratic World Cup related stories, such as stalking Claudio Caniggia outside his hotel overlooking Copacabana beach and managing to conduct a half hour interview with the former Dundee and Rangers star. It felt like something of a coup, considering Argentina were playing the Netherlands next in the last four. And who wouldn’t want to be at such a clash of the giants? Well, maybe those who didn’t want to miss Brazil 0 Germany 7. I opted for São Paulo rather than Belo Horizonte’s match of the millennium. Ouch.
Still, bagging Caniggia made up for a lot. I still remember scuttling through the backstreets of Copacabana back to my air bnb pad terrified that this was the moment those who claimed it was only a matter of time until I was mugged would be proven right. If so, they could have anything they wanted – my phone, wallet, even my passport -but they couldn’t have my Dictaphone.
Many of these memories flooded back as I stood in line at the US Embassy in London last week waiting to have my papers stamped for the States. Having long ago made my peace with the fact Scotland would never again quality for the World Cup, it was now feeling very real. “And what is it you intend to do on your visit, Sir?”
It would be nice to report on Scotland making history and reaching the second stage at a major finals for the first time. Not that the pleasant embassy official wanted to know this. Of course, the protestors outside the heavily fortressed building, with its six-foot high blast walls, who were condemning American imperialism were a reminder that there will be many other issues at play as well, not solely on the football pitch. Events in the Middle East since Saturday have simply underlined this.
Iran appear on the brink of becoming the first country to pull out of a World Cup since several nations—including Scotland—declined to travel to Brazil in 1950. Meanwhile, eye-wateringly high ticket prices will rightly dominate the agenda. But with the countdown preparing to click into double digits, the show will go on.
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