I have been a Scottish sports fan long enough to know that hope is a trap. It is a beautifully constructed, expertly baited trap that gets you every single time. You see your team winning, you hear the commentators say words like “historic” and “remarkable” and “genuine contender,” and before you know it you are standing in your living room at half past four on a Saturday afternoon, shouting at the television like a man possessed, fully invested in an outcome that the universe has already decided will end in tears.
And yet. Here I am again.
The Maroon Revolution
Hearts are top of the Scottish Premiership. Let me write that again, because it still does not feel quite real. Hearts are top of the Scottish Premiership. Fifty points from twenty-two matches. Two points clear of Rangers, three ahead of Celtic. They have beaten both Old Firm sides home and away. Lawrence Shankland and Claudio Braga are the top two scorers in the league. They have lost once all season.
It is the first time since 1993 that a club outside the Old Firm has led the title race at this stage. For anyone under the age of forty, this is entirely new territory. For those of us old enough to remember what Scottish football looked like before the Celtic-Rangers duopoly became the accepted natural order, it feels like something stirring in the memory. Not quite a resurrection. More like the realisation that the thing you thought was dead was only sleeping.
Tynecastle has become a fortress. The atmosphere on match days has an edge to it that reminds me of what football grounds used to feel like before corporate hospitality and all-seater regulations took the wildness out of the experience. The Gorgie faithful know what they are watching. They know it might not last. That is precisely what makes it so intoxicating.
The Shankland injury, though. Six weeks out with a hamstring strain, picked up in the Scottish Cup exit against Falkirk. That is the kind of setback that separates fairy tales from reality. Hearts without Shankland is like Scotland without, well, I will come to that.
Finn Russell and the Calcutta Cup
The fourteenth of February, 2026. Valentine’s Day. Murrayfield. Scotland against England. If you are going to fall in love with Scottish sport again, you might as well do it on the most appropriate date imaginable.
Scotland won 31-20 and it was not as close as the score suggests. Huw Jones and Jamie Ritchie scored tries that had the stadium shaking. Ben White added another. Finn Russell kicked with the precision of a man who has spent his entire career doing things that should not be possible and making them look routine. England managed a Henry Arundell try but never looked like they had the measure of a Scottish side that played with a fury and intelligence that took the breath away.
The Calcutta Cup came home. It is a sentence I never tire of writing.
Then came Cardiff. Wales, winless and desperate, produced a first half that had me reaching for the remote. Rhys Carre and Josh Adams scored. Scotland trailed 17-5 at the break. Kyle Steyn had replied but it looked like the same old story. Scotland building hope only to squander it in a ground where we have suffered more than our share of disappointments.
What happened in the second half was the kind of performance that makes you believe Gregor Townsend has built something genuine. Three tries. Russell, Darcy Graham, George Turner. A comeback from twelve points down to win 26-23. Scotland are on course for a first Triple Crown since 1990. There are still France in Edinburgh and Ireland in Dublin to negotiate, and I am not foolish enough to count those chickens. But the question is no longer whether Scotland can compete with the best. The question is whether they can sustain it.
The Sione Tuipulotu Factor
A word about the captain. Sione Tuipulotu does not generate the headlines that Russell does, because Russell is the kind of player who makes the impossible look casual and the casual look impossible. But Tuipulotu’s leadership of this squad has been transformative. He leads by example in the way that the best captains always do, with his body, with his commitment to contact, with the quiet authority that comes from being the hardest working man on the pitch every single Saturday.
The return of Jonny Gray adds experience and steel to a pack that was already formidable. Glasgow Warriors have provided the spine of this team, and their form in the URC has translated directly onto the international stage. This is not a Scotland side built on one or two talented individuals. It is a squad with depth and belief and, most dangerously of all, momentum.
The Scottish Condition
Here is my problem, and it is a problem shared by every Scottish sports fan alive. I have been here before. Not in these exact circumstances, perhaps, but in the emotional territory. The territory where everything is going well and you can see the thing you have been dreaming about and it is right there, almost close enough to touch, and you know, you absolutely know, that something is about to go wrong.
Hearts will lose Shankland for six crucial weeks and Celtic will find the form that has been eluding them and the title will slip away in April. Scotland will beat France at Murrayfield and then go to Dublin and lose by three points in injury time and the Triple Crown will dissolve like morning frost. This is how Scottish sport works. It gives you just enough to keep you coming back, then takes it away at the moment of maximum pain.
Except. Except that sometimes it does not. Sometimes the fairy tale holds. Sometimes Hearts really do break the Old Firm’s forty-year monopoly. Sometimes Scotland really do win a Triple Crown. Sometimes the man who kicks the winning drop goal in Dublin is a thirty-three-year-old fly-half from Stirling who has spent his career being told he is too unpredictable, too mercurial, too much of a risk.
I do not know which version of the story we are living through. Nobody does. That is what makes sport worth caring about. That is what makes it worth the inevitable heartbreak.
March Will Tell Us Everything
The next three weeks will define the Scottish sporting year. Hearts face a run of fixtures that will test whether their squad has the depth to cope without Shankland. Scotland travel to Edinburgh for France and then Dublin for Ireland in matches that will determine whether this Six Nations campaign ends in glory or the familiar sting of near-miss.
I will be watching every minute of it. I will be shouting at the television. I will be falling for the trap again, because that is what being Scottish is. We do not support our teams because we expect them to win. We support them because the hope itself, however foolish, however frequently betrayed, is the thing that binds us together.
Hearts are top of the league. Scotland have the Calcutta Cup. Finn Russell is playing the best rugby of his life. For this one brief, brilliant, terrifying moment, Scottish sport is asking us to believe.
God help me, I think I do.