SCOTLAND is obsessed by football like no other nation. The Brazilians and the Italians may challenge us when it comes to breast-beating passion, but there the similarity ends: our obsession is singularly joyless.
Our national team specialises in abject failure and has never gone beyond the first round of the World Cup finals; our national league is an unedifying brawl between two bastions of sectarian intolerance.
Yet we keep coming back to the football. We pay the £20 entry knowing there’s better entertainment on offer at the local multiplex for a quarter of the price, and endanger relationships by dashing into Dixons for the final scores while out shopping.
Scotland is a peculiarly one-sport nation. We don’t find solace elsewhere when football makes our lives a misery. Compare England’s football fans who, while squirming at the embarrassment of defeat in Northern Ireland, could still bask in the afterglow of the Ashes.
Scottish football is a selfish, exploitative partner in an unequal relationship – we devote our lives to it for little in return, clutching onto infrequent slivers of pleasure. And no matter how often we threaten to break-up and swear we’re never putting up with that crap again, football knows we’ll come sloping back for more.
Welcome to Fitba Hell.