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Will this match
be about football
or politics?
Alasdair McKillop
Scotland and England are to meet at Wembley on 14 August 2013 as part of the Football Association’s 150th anniversary celebrations. It will be the first meeting of the two rivals since the 1999 two-legged play-off encounter for the European Championships. England triumphed 2-0 at Hampden thanks to a double from Paul Scholes and, while Scotland won at the old Wembley courtesy of a Don Hutchinson goal, the English persevered on aggregate.
The rivalry is considered to be the oldest in international football and the two sides first met in 1872 at the West of Scotland Cricket Club in Glasgow. Around 4,000 were in attendance that day but around 20 times that number will be there next autumn. Both camps are probably anticipating a high octane encounter with history seeping in around the edges. There was much appreciative purring coming from the respective managers following the announcement.
Scotland manager Craig Levein, quoted in the Sunday Herald, said: ‘I am thrilled that we have reached agreement with the FA to play at Wembley as part of their 150th anniversary celebrations and I am sure the supporters will be there in their tens of thousands’. Roy Hodgson, the England manager seemed similarly enthusiastic. He said: ‘For us, England v Scotland is one of the finest fixtures in international football and I know what this game means to both sets of supporters’. He continued: ‘It will be a fitting part of the FA’s 150th anniversary celebrations and the supporters, the team and my coaching staff are all looking forward to welcoming Scotland to Wembley next year’. Hodgson was possibly minded to add: ‘Now let me get back to the competitive tournament that I’m involved in right now’, but he has to play his role in hyping up the fixture.
The intervening 13 years since the last encounter have arguably seen the two nations grow apart according to various indicators. England have qualified for the majority of international tournaments while the narrow defeat to England was the closest Scotland have come since the last time they qualified for a major tournament back in 1998. Although the current England squad is widely considered to be on a managed downward trajectory, there is little evidence that Scotland are coming up to meet even this reduced quality.
The Tartan Army, that strange product of invented Highland culture filtered through the 20th-century urban experience, have almost assumed greater importance than the team they follow
Alasdair McKillop is a member of the Rangers Supporters Trust writing in an independent capacity
