There are certain things that come guaranteed ahead of Scotland’s meetings with England at football.
Of noise in the lead-up to kick off there will plenty, especially at the venue that hosts Saturday’s World cup qualifier, Hampden Park.
Of nostalgia there is always a great deal.
It is the most ancient of international rivalries, a cross-border squabble that goes all the way back to 1872, and, in the age of televised football, has a long, colourful and heavily tartaned showreel featuring incidents such as 40 years ago, when Scottish supporters celebrated a win at Wembley, England’s supposed fortress, by dismantling the frame of a goal.
Or the Saturday at Hampden at the end of 1999 when a pair of Paul Scholes goals effectively put England into the European championship finals in the first leg of a most parochial set of play-offs.
Nostalgia aside, that date remains something of a watershed, the last competitive pair of clashes between the two nations until they were drawn in the same qualifying group for Russia 2018.
And the 1-0 win Scotland achieved in the London leg, insufficient to alter the aggregate outcome, was the last time the Scots beat the English.
Last November’s 3-0 win by England in the home qualifier in Group F of this World Cup joust hardly suggests a pattern of English superiority is ready to be reversed– the English also won friendlies in 2013 and 2014.
Scotland manager Gordon Strachan bullishly insisted “the gulf isn’t that big”.
Strachan has been in charge for all three of the Scotland defeats since 1999 and knows that a significant anniversary is approaching, too.
Should Scotland fail to reach Russia, they will pass 20 years without participation in a major championship finals.
The last time their supporters, a contingent who would almost win international popularity contests when set against English fans who continue to carry a reputation for fringe thuggery, travelled anywhere en masse to a tournament was to the 1998 World Cup in France.
The steady decline rears up starkly in Strachan’s rear-view mirror partly because his own playing career as a busy, inventive and determined winger coincided with what now looks like a glorious era for the national side.
Strachan’s 50 caps for Scotland included two World Cup tournaments in 1982 and 1986, in the middle of a period in which his country qualified for five successive World Cups.
That in an era when the number of finalists was far smaller at 16 or 24 teams.
Strachan is reluctant to hark back to those times.
There are more than enough of his contemporaries employed in the British media as pundits making the point that things were better in their generation, though he has drawn on selected experiences he had as manager of Celtic in recent memory to stoke optimism, notably an Uefa Champions League win over what was a formidable Manchester United in 2006.
He can equally look to Celtic’s current squad, winners of a Scottish treble this season and a team who drew twice with Manchester City in the Champions League last autumn, for confidence.
The club supply six members of Strachan’s squad.
But another six come from clubs who were performing in the English Championship, the second-tier of English football, last season.
Here the difference in the pool of resources that Strachan, on the one hand, and Gareth Southgate, England’s manager, can call in is spelled out brutally.
Southgate’s squad includes 13 players who will take part in next season’s Champions League. Both managers share a concern that too many players from outside their countries are employed in their respective leagues, restricting the opportunities for young Scottish or English players to develop.
But Southgate, able to call on the captain of champions Chelsea, Gary Cahill, and a quartet of Tottenham Hotspur starlets, led by Harry Kane and Dele Alli, seems less hamstrung by that than Strachan.
Consider this: In this season’s Scottish Footballers’ Association Team of the Year, three Englishmen featured alongside an Irishman, a Swede, a Frenchman and five Scots.
None of those Englishmen – Scott Sinclair, Joe Lewis and Shay Logan – features in Southgate’s plans. And no Scottish players made the English Premier League’s Team of the Year, or even represented a club that finished above 10th in the English top flight.
No one doubts the Scots will show braveheart qualities Saturday, but they will taking on a team with a far more sophisticated set of weapons.
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