Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five

Issue 140 - Deliverance

28 years is a long time to wait.

For something that feels like deliverance, it might be just long enough.

Welcome to Issue 140 of Deep Life Reflections, my weekly Friday writings on life.

At around 10:30pm local time on Tuesday night, something extraordinary happened. Less than five minutes later, it happened again.

If my neighbours had somehow slept through the first eruption of noise—a monumental, guttural roar—they were not escaping the second.

Scotland had scored two goals in injury time (those final fleeting minutes at the end of a game.)

Two quite breathtaking goals.

Two of the best goals in our footballing history.

And two that arrived when all looked doomed—like the cowboy hero aboard a driverless train in the final frame of an old Saturday matinee, just before it plunges into the ravine.

From the jaws of failure and heartache and misery—territory we know all too well—came unrestrained, uninhibited, rampant joy. For everyone in the national stadium. For an entire nation. For the Scottish diaspora scattered around the globe, from Boston to Bahrain to Brisbane. Like the cowboy, we somehow found a way off the plunging train.  

Scotland had qualified for the World Cup. For the first time in 28 years.

We’re still not quite sure how.

Journalist Ewan Murray summed it up best “PhD students could produce work on how on earth Scotland achieved this qualification. They appeared down and out at times. It was almost as if someone, somewhere had decided the Scots have suffered long enough.”

Scotland will now take its place at the FIFA World Cup 2026, held next summer in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It will be the first time Scotland have appeared since 1998. An entire lost generation.  

28 years is indeed a long time to wait.

A comment on YouTube has 14,000 likes. It simply says:

“was there, best night of my life.”

Many of you reading won’t know—or care—that Scotland qualified for the World Cup. That we beat Denmark 4-2 in a seismic match. That three of our goals have already become national treasures, already immortalised in repeated replay loops on YouTube. That we didn’t even play especially well.

And that’s OK. Because this isn’t really about football, but about what it means when, after years of heartbreak, something finally goes right. Something finally pays off.

Scotland last played at the World Cup in 1998, which was held in France. I was there with friends. 22 years old. A long time ago now. Scotland’s third and final game in that tournament was a bone-splintering 3-0 defeat to Morocco. We haven’t played since. There’s been a couple of close calls, moments when we nearly made it. This is the glorious failure label Scotland has earned and worn for decades.

In the British film, Clockwise, John Cleese’s uptight headmaster Brian Stimpson, facing one calamitous set-back after another, forlornly tells his student, “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”    

He might as well have been speaking about supporters of Scotland. Far too many glimmers of hope in the intervening years—all cruelly extinguished, wrapped in our thick, knotted blend of self-deprecating humour and fatalism.

In a WhatsApp group I’m part of, one of my friends ran a short poll on whether Scotland would beat Denmark to qualify. Not a single person voted yes. Even I said, “Heart says yes, head says no.” Too many (painful) memories. I am forever scarred by Costa Rica in 1990.

Sport is a cliché-heavy subject. Football especially. It’s so pervasive in our society, played at every level regardless of social or economic status. The great leveller. Even if you don’t like football (or sport more widely), you likely have friends and family who do. Some adopt an almost religious-like fervour. Witness the Manchester United supporter who proudly drapes the following banner at every match: “United. Kids. Wife. In that order.”

We know deep down it’s ridiculous to get so worked up about someone we’ve never met in a blue shirt knocking a ball past someone else we’ve never met in a red shirt. Heaven help us if they manage to force the ball into the back of a netted rectangle. Millions of years of evolution and it comes down to something wildly impersonal that truly moves us. That’s quite the reckoning.

A reminder that hope and persistence have its moments. That football (or sport)—at its best—isn’t escapism but a concentration of life. A release. All the longing, the stakes, the blunt force trauma, and yes, the magic.

Sportswriter Max Rushden wrote yesterday,

“We all know that social media is a terrible doomed place, but perhaps it’s all worth it for these moments: an avalanche of limbs, joyous videos from pubs and more pubs and airports and living rooms and badly angled iPhones in the stadium.” 

There’s a name for this feeling: delayed gratification. The long wait. It’s the ability to resist the temptation of a small, forgettable reward in favour of something bigger, better, more enduring. Something to really savour. But you have to hold out for it. Really hold out.

Days, weeks, months, sometimes even years.   

I know what that feels like now.

Deliverance.

A Question for you

What’s something you’ve waited years for and was it worth it?

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