Wings Over Scotland

Tonight’s games went as badly as they could have done for Scotland, pretty much as we suggested they would at the weekend, after a truly abysmal Scottish performance (an embarrassing 28% possession) saw them beaten 3-2 by Germany while Ireland scraped past Georgia 1-0.

But as we also said, and despite the clueless honkings of just about every pundit working in a TV studio tonight, it didn’t actually damage the team’s chances of making the playoffs very much.

Here’s your quick guide to where things stand.

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A very brief post about football, because it was irritating to listen to the avalanche of gloom on social media on Friday night as Scotland lost to Georgia (again), and then have to watch this honking oaf go trolling.

Shut your faces, all of you.

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Many pundits are of the opinion that the new Tory Max government will be actively hostile to the BBC, which the party has long believed is an expensive public-sector hotbed of right-on lefties. So when we did our latest poll, it seemed worth finding out how much the people of Scotland valued the state broadcaster.

There were, let’s say, some interesting quirks.

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The reasons for Scottish Labour’s obliteration at the hands of the electorate last week are manifold, and most of them were very thoroughly explored in the weekend’s press, for example by Kevin McKenna here and here.

But as is our wont here on Wings, we wanted something a little more empirical to get our teeth into, so a few days before the election we commissioned a poll of 1,013 Scottish voters from Panelbase covering some of the subjects the regional office had campaigned on under its branch manager Jim Murphy.

The results were fascinating.

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It gets clearer with every passing day that Scottish Labour’s chief election strategy is to assume that Scottish voters are goldfish. There’s no other explanation for a piece in yesterday’s Courier on the SNP’s Jamie Hepburn’s call for the implementation of a 2009 report into which sporting events should be protected from pay-TV broadcasters.

The article concluded with some comments from Labour.

“It was reported last month that Labour will include a commitment in its general election manifesto to ensure major sporting such as the Open Championship are shown on terrestrial TV.

Scottish leader Jim Murphy told the Scotland and Sunday events like the Open and international football “shouldn’t be a minority sport for only those who can afford satellite television subscriptions”.

A party spokesman said today: “We’re happy to send the SNP Government links to all the announcements Jim Murphy and Kez Dugdale have made so that it is easier for them to adopt our policies.”

Which is, y’know, bold.

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It looks very much as though Scottish Labour are pinning their hopes of recovery on “Glasgow Man”, and they’ve plainly decided he’s an Old Firm fan.

Today’s press release in the Scotsman – which oddly relegates Jim Murphy to second billing halfway down the page – goes under the unlikely headline of “Miliband will keep Scotland games on terrestial [sic] TV”, and claims that the Scottish national football team’s tournament qualifiers will be added to the “crown jewels” list of games which are only allowed to be shown on free-to-air terrestrial TV, not satellite pay channels.

But readers might be wise to be sceptical.

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We’re technically on holiday today, folks, so for the first time in a very long time we’re going to write something about football and if you don’t like it that’s just your tough luck. Nobody’s making you click the “Read more” button.

Two fairly remarkable things happened in Scottish football today. The first was that Aberdeen went top of the Premiership for the first time in about 20 years, but the second was of a bit more relevance to this site’s political and media-monitoring brief.

That’s because, for the very first time that we’re aware of since Rangers went bust in 2012, the chief executive of the Scottish league’s governing body, Neil Doncaster, explicitly and directly stated that the club currently 15 points adrift of Hearts in the game’s second tier was the same one that died two and a half years ago.

And that matters more than you think it does.

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Fans of the bewildering in Scottish politics don’t look set to be disappointed in 2015.

Jim Murphy’s only been the Scottish Labour “leader” for a week, but already he seems hell-bent on hurling the party’s North British branch into the padded walls of its cell with more vigour than ever before, heroically ignoring the open door.

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STV Sport has tonight broken the news that Scotland will play England in a friendly international at Hampden on November 18 this year.

Would you like to imagine, readers, the songs the visiting England support might sing if Scotland had voted to continue being ruled by them exactly two months earlier?

If you feel your strength sapping between now and September, remember that.

To cut a long story short, Wings readers, it turns out that by a freakish coincidence I have a fax number only one digit different to that of Alistair Darling’s constituency office. Attached below is a document I unexpectedly found in my in-tray this evening.

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It’s already been in the comments, and it’s all over Twitter, but it’d be remiss of us not to give as many people as possible the chance to enjoy this.

Blair McDougall’s a big Rangers fan. See if you can spot him anywhere.

We’ve had a go at this subject once before, but this time we’ve come up with a less hyperbolic analogy. It was sparked by another Twitter comment from Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, which cropped up last night in the middle of some truly abject cringing from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall.

.@bobby_mckail@Dungarbhan@blairmcdougall@Jenemm3 My country is Scotland.

— John McTernan (@johnmcternan) November 7, 2013

We couldn’t help but note the use of the singular.

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