Scotland 0—1 Hungary

Scotland had most of the ball in the first half. No shots on goal. Nothing much to shout about. Orban, of Hungary, had the best chance of the half. He should have scored with a header. It had me thinking Scotland were England in disguise. Hungary started to dominate as the half progressed. Pedestrian performance. Grant Hanley and Jack Hendry had the most touches.

The only real surprise coming from the other tie. Switzerland beating Germany 1—0 at half time. It ended 1—1.

Scotland should have had a penalty when substitute Stuart Armstrong was pulled back in the box, late on. That would probably have been enough to win it? But it wasn’t given.

The main talking point until that point was Barnabas Vargas getting wiped out by the Scotland keeper, Angus Gunn, and being stretchered off. It wasn’t a foul, although there was a penalty check, not given.

Hungary hit the post. Gunn had to make saves from Dominik Szoboszlai and Kevin Csoboth as the game opened up with ten minutes added time remaining.

Substitute, Lewis Morgan had a half chance. Then Grant Hanley headed the ball back across goal. Callum McGregor tried to shoot but his shot was blocked. Hungary broke away, and Morgan tried to get back and block a cut back. Csoborth scored in the 100^th minute with the last kick of the ball. Game over. Euros over for Scotland.

Both teams were rubbish. Neither deserves to go through. Luck was with the Hungarians. Varga was stable in the hospital. It turned out well for the Magyars. They sent us homeward to think again. Hugely disappointing for those 200 000 Scottish fans that made their way to Germany. Nobody expected us to do much than drink the bars dry. But for a Scottish team to go out and play so badly and go out without any kind of fight was disappointing. This wasn’t glorious defeat. This was finishing bottom of the group on merit.

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Euro 2024

Euros 2024.

When I’m not watching fitba, I watch Scotland. I want Scotland to win and England to lose. Scotland didn’t so much get beaten in the opening match as humiliated 5—1 by the host nation Germany. For once, the pubs were busy. Even my gang hut The Drop Inn. One woman customer was on her toes screaming, ‘Penalty! Penalty! Even when a less drunk guy *(if such a thing exists in The Drop Inn) explained to her that it was a penalty not to Scotland, but to Germany, she didn’t get it. She continued screaming, ‘Penalty.’ Maybe she still is. There are penalties for living in a parallel universe.

It was also a red-card. Ryan Porteous will miss the next two games. So it wasn’t that bad.

A sad punter had put Scotland on to win the tournament. His odds were 80—1. Shite odds. 8 000 000 000—1 and I’d stick a pound on our boys.

I’m Celtic through and through. West Germany duly beat Hungary 2—0 and qualified from Group A. I’m thoroughly familiar with European ties and not finishing bottom of the group and finishing bottom, anyway.

The other side of that, of course, is glorious failure. Celtic and Scotland always come up trumps. The first World Cup I watched from start to finish (Germany beat Holland in the final) we beat Zaire and drew with Brazil in the group section. We had to beat them but were squeezed out.

Glorious failure didn’t come better than having to beat the Dutch of Cruyff and Neeskins in 1978 by three clear goals to qualify. Impossible. But we nearly done and it were dreaming when  European Cup winner, Archie Gemmill scored that goal to put us 3—1 up. Holland scored again of course. I forgave them when they gave us Wim Jensen.

Scotland will not win the tournament. I’m not sure we’ll beat Switzerland or Hungary.  

England might win the Euros. I don’t hate England in the way I hate Rangers. I’m largely indifferent to them. Alex Ferguson would call them our ‘noisy neighbours,’ multiplied by media jingoism and flag waving 48 million fold. It’s not a good mix. England have the players to win it. I’m not sure they have the team. Germany, on home soil, looks the team to beat. They haven’t actually played anyone yet. But they have coasted through two matches. England struggled but still won. They’ll meet in the quarter-finals if everything goes according to plan (it rarely does, even for Man City). Penalty! Penalties?

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Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song

Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song.

Writers are told, never start with the weather. Paul Lynch starts with the weather in his debut novel, Red Sky in the Morning. Prophet Song, Lynch’s latest award-winning novel, starts with the night weather and a knocking on the door.

‘The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window, looking out at the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whispers.’

Long convoluted sentences that don’t make sense yet they do. A writer’s job is make things worse for his or her characters.

Mother Courage, Ellish Stack has a Phd and a good job. Her dad, Simon, was a scientist too, but her mother is dead, and he’s paranoid, and in the early stages of dementia. Larry, her husband works for the teacher’s union. They’re respectfully upper-middle class and their eldest son is in line to become that icon of respectability—he has a university place to study medicine. His future is set. She has three other children, including baby, Ben. 

The knocking on the window is their Kristallnacht. They are not Jews. But Larry Stack as a trade-unionist is an enemy of the people. Two officers from the Irish Government’s newly formed GNSB have come to question him. Have come to warn his family. This will be your fate if you oppose us. In the name of freedom, they’re asking them to give up their freedom of thought and assembly, freedom of the press and mass media. It’s a Trumpian scenario we’re all familiar with.

‘The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another, and the end of the world is always a local event. It comes to your country, visits your town, knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.’

Prophecy comes from the prayer-book of it couldn’t happen to us. Inevitably it does. Germany, Chile, Spain and Ireland itself had their ‘Disappeared’. Ellish refuses to believe that Larry is gone. Disappeared.

The Irish Government dictatorship will somehow see sense. Suspend the Emergency Powers and the curfews and the rounding up of enemies of the people. Her son, Mark, the doctor-to-be will not be drafted into the militia and fascist army of the governing forces. The logic of inevitably and disbelief creates a toxic fatalism.

‘We were offered visas to Australia, but we turned them down. How could we have known what was going to happen? Leaving everything behind was impossible.’

The impossible is always impossible until it becomes possible. Prophet Song seems prescient. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ An epigram attributed to the philosopher and essayist George Santayana. It is often paraphrased as ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.’

Santayana first used this expression in his work ‘The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress,’ which was published in 1905. Mother Courage, the heroine in the novel 2023 by Ellish Stack, illustrates that not much progress has been made. We wait to bear witness to see if the moron’s moron Trump will be re-elected President. Prophet Song may well follow this playbook in American society. Hyperbole? I hope so.

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