NEDS … 1 NEDERLANDS .. 0

Okay so some of the anti-Advocaat songs and one random, singular volley of “dirty orange bastards” were a bit too well worn to have come solely from a love of the Scottish national team but a bit of genuine football hatred is always preferable to the fake plastic gits who constitute the self-styled Tartan Army!

Yesterday was all about historic football, rib cage-bursting pride, salty-eyed emotion and sheer footballing drama of the highest order so I’m going to get the negative stuff out the way as quickly as possible. If you don’t mind, I’ll achieve that end by cramming it all into one heroically long sentence:

While declaring their contempt for anyone who doesn’t stand up for ninety minutes, doesn’t own a Runrig album, doesn’t know how to face humiliating defeat with a cheeky-chappie rendition of Doh-a-deer” (a song from a musical … at a football match .. sung by drunken men … ooh, how brilliantly incongruous!), doesn’t wear a kilt and/or saltire face paint and doesn’t know every catchphrase from Chewin The Fat/every line from the Braveheart script (it was filmed in IRELAND, with WIlliam Wallace played by an Aussie-American, ya gits!), most of my fellow Travel Club members perched high above the South/East stand contra-flow further displayed their legendary loyalty to and genuine interest in their footballing heroes by spending most of the game turning away from the action and shouting at various friends in rectal plops of “listen-to-me-everyone” repartee, pissing off for a piss/pie/chips/coke/all four, arguing with the stewards about standing on the aisles, arguing with other punters about “this izz mah seat - aw naw - yer right - ahm in the rang row “, confusing me with a staircase, trying to convince the polis they weren’t so fu**ing pished out their skulls there was no way on earth they’d ever remember a single footballing fact about the match they’d spent the last few weeks boasting to their work colleagues they just HAAAAAD to be at because they loved Scotland SOOOOO much etc etc etc.

The REAL Scotland fans (and judging by the attendance at the friendly with Austria, I’d say there are about 12,000 of us) - the ones who actually go to these games to be happy if the team wins, sad if it loses and to accumulate knowledge of both our own side and the opposition and compile our feelings about the state of Scotish football as it’s represented to the rest of the world through our international XI - we could have been seriously extra-pissed off by these arseholes yesterday. But the action on the field was just too damn enthralling - just too damn good.

You’ll have read the papers, seen it on the TV - you all know what happened at Hampden yesteday and, especially with Jaap Stamm’s loss nowhere near as devestating to Holland as Christian Dailly’s is to Scotland, you all know that the Netherlands are still the overwhelming favourites to go though to Portugal, but this game HAS to be memorialised here on Gers@OpenFootie.

Regular readers of the ramblings on this site will know your editor has a healthy contempt for, not just the deliberate cliche which is the “tartan Army” but also the lazy perpetuation of the myth that it’s almost worth watching Scotland’s national team struggle against minnows because we’ll then, by natural right, excel against the giants of the world game. There’s a misconception bred in these stories, and the way they’re told, which says every failure against a Costa Rica or an Iran will lead directly to a win over a Germany or, say, a Holland. Ehm … noh exactly.

This week’s newspaper and TV GARBAGE about Archie Gemmill’s famous 1978 World Cup goal against the Dutch was a case in point. Yes, we lost to Peru (hardly a duff team in the seventies so that’s never been the “shock” result it was made out to be) and drew with Iran in Argentina and, yes, we did go on to beat Holland in the same first round group. But the win over Holland was meaningless BECAUSE the point dropped against Iran cost us our place in the last eight. Our failure to keep a clean sheet against New Zealand in 1982 and our loss to Costa Rica in 1990 cost Scotland their chance to qualify for the second stages of a major finals. No gallant draw with the Soviet Union or feisty win over Sweden could compensate for the damage we’d already inflicted upon ourselves in these tournaments by failing to do the simple thing.

Archie Gemmill’s goal in Mendoza is truly a thing of beauty - I remember watching it live, in my pyjamas (How the whole pub laughed when I turned up in my P-Js but there you are, I was mental in the seventies!) but Johnny Rep’s 200-yard effort in the same match was probably as spectacular and Arie Haan’s winner against Italy later in the tournament was probaly better altogether (despite whatever awards Gemmill’s cracker may have won) - but I now HATE that Gemmill goal because of the way it’s used to hold us back. In 78 Holland went on to lose the final, by the width of a post, to the host nation. We went straight home. Even if we’d beaten Ernst Happell’s Dutch by the desired margin of three-clear goals, FIFA later docked us points for the Willie Johnston doping bust so we never came close to even so much as glorious failure in that trournament.

But all this week Christian Dailly has been talking of HIS contempt for that dribble-tastic goal of quarter of a century ago. The West Ham defender has come across brilliantly in every one of his interviews and his steely-eyed focus and determination was the one grain of hope our country owned going into this Euro 2004 play-off.

No matter how naive the reasoning behind his outburst in the Westfalen Stadion, that expletive-filled slating transported Dailly’s image among the rank and file Scottish football fans like myself. The former Dundee United starlet had previously symbolised the money madness of the nineties - he seemed nothing but a journeyman pro with a good physique but little technique, who’d managed to accumulate a few squilion quid in transfers between Tannadice, Notts Forest, Derby and the Hammers. He was seen as little more than an unfeeling mercenary. His Dortmund rant and his subsequent on-camera interview, teeming with raw, genuine, unscripted, wounded pride, have turned my previous feeling about Dailly into a small matter of personal shame.

This week, in all the press conferences leading up to the KNVB’s arrival in Glesgie, Dailly gave us hope that another clich