Wings Over Scotland

(And Get Away With It)

You’d have to be living in a pretty strict prison not to have heard the big story from today’s Olympics in Paris, in which male Algerian cheat Imane Khelefi was put in a boxing ring with young Italian woman Angela Carini and allowed to hit her in the head for 46 seconds until she retired, in tears and in fear for her safety, saying “I had to preserve my life”.

Sound like your kind of fun, men? It’s surprisingly easy!

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Let’s take a moment off, folks. In our latest Panelbase poll, we also threw in a question just for fun, with genuinely no agenda at all, simply because we were curious to know what the answer was. Here it is:

Some of the detail, though, might intrigue you.

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For what these are about, see here. This one’s from 23 August 2019.

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I’m going to talk about this story for a bit, and I’m sorry because I’m as sick of this subject as everyone else is but it’s really really important. Tune out for 10 minutes if you must.

I’ve never been a person who suffered from blackouts. In my younger days I would frequently drink Olympian amounts of booze and pass out in a heap (and/or pool of my own vomit) under a table, but when I woke up I always remembered how I got there. I also went under general anaesthetic a couple of times at the dentist when I was wee, and always remembered counting down from 10 with the mask on before I woke up. (“10…9…8…zzzzzzzz”)

In my entire half-century on this planet, there’s only one gap in my memory. (Like, I don’t remember what I had for dinner on 8 July 1987, but you know what I mean. I remembered it the next day, just not any more.)

It happened when I was about 14, playing rugby at school.

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From today’s Telegraph:

But who’s this “we”, exactly?

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A real advert currently showing on TV:

An older version:

Watching the Six Nations rugby tournament every year is usually quite a dispiriting experience – not just because of Scotland’s invariably underwhelming performances (broken up by the occasional false dawn), but because talking about it on social media always results in an extremely tedious flood of comments about how rugby is a sport played and watched exclusively by middle-class Tory No voters.

(That’s Scotland skipper Greig Laidlaw there, with Wings mascot Hamish.)

Speaking as someone whose interest in the tournament (in the pre-inflation days when it was the Five Nations) was first sparked when my extremely working-class Bathgate comprehensive school started taking pupils to Murrayfield in the 1980s – 50p for the bus and 50p for the match ticket, which got you a seat on wooden benches actually on the grass – this attitude has always instinctively felt like complete nonsense.

So when we did our latest Panelbase poll during this year’s competition, we figured we may as well actually find out.

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So this was in the Times football section today:

And you find yourself thinking, “Well gee, why might THAT be, Alex?”

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…for the relationship between the four “partner” nations of the UK presented itself at the weekend when BBC anchorman John Inverdale asked the Scottish rugby pundit and former international Andy Nicol “what does this do for self-belief from a Scottish perspective, Andy?”

Which was clearly pretty ironic in itself:

But alert readers may recall how that “epitome of Better Together” worked out.

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Tremendous news for the rest of Scotland’s football clubs as Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers promises never to win the treble unbeaten again, even if his side score more goals than the other team in all their matches.

That’s how it works, right?

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…is roughly how often Aberdeen get to the final of the Scottish Cup these days. The last time was 17 years ago – a tournament which started in the last century and ended the year Rangers started paying their players with EBTs – when SFA rules meant that they had to play almost the entire game without a recognised goalkeeper.

(A tackle in the third minute broke veteran custodian Jim Leighton’s jaw, and because you were only allowed three players on the subs bench the Dons had no backup No.1 and had to put striker Robbie Winters between the sticks, with a predictable outcome. Leighton never played professional football again.)

In politics, Labour were only one year into the first ever administration of the modern Scottish Parliament, and still in the first term of Tony Blair’s rule at Westminster. The idea of the SNP winning an election, let alone holding an independence referendum, was the preserve of mad fantasists.

And the last time the Pittodrie side actually won the trophy was 27 years back, which is so long ago that most of Hampden was still open to the elements.

Still, it would be weird if we got to the final again next year and some of the Aberdeen support refused to go on the grounds that the matter of who was the best cup football team in Scotland had been settled forever today.

Or if Celtic won but had fielded an ineligible player and the SFA ordered a replay, but the Dons declined to take part because they’d played too many finals recently.

Just saying.

#COYR

Today we’re a boxing site, and that’s all there is to it.

The categorical support of Andy Murray for Scottish independence, though only finally unambiguously revealed in today’s Sunday Times (the tennis star’s day-of-poll tweet backing Yes could by a strict semantic interpretation have been said to be somewhat equivocal), isn’t much of a surprise.

So it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what the media told us.

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