Some vignettes from my sporting past.
It is 1974, and I am slouching sadly away from the school TV room having just watched Willie Ormand's Scotland team exit the World Cup. England have failed to qualify, courtesy of Poland's goalkeeper, and Scotland seem an acceptable substitute. More than that, with a team stuffed full of luminaries - Dalglish, Jordan, Bremner, Johnstone, McQueen, Buchan and Law - they clearly have a chance of doing quite well. But although all teams in their group beat Zaire, the other group games are draws and Scotland go out on goal difference, the first team ever to exit the competition unbeaten.
Now fast forward to 1990. I am in the Argyll Arms Hotel in Ullapool, a solitary and rather nervous Englishman in the public bar watching England play West Germany in the World Cup semis. By the time the game goes to penalties I have already worked out from the rapturous reception of the Germans' opening goal and the silence which greets Gary Lineker's equaliser that I am alone in more ways than one. And when Stuart Pearce wafts his penalty over the bar there is no need for me to go back inside and enquire (I couldn't actually watch, obviously): the roar of approbation tells me all I need to know, and I wander disconsolately away into the luminous West Highland night, reflecting that the party of Germans who have hung their national flag out of a window have gauged the local mood rather better than I have.
I mention all this not to prove I have a greater capacity for generosity of spirit than a randomly selected group of Scots more than twenty years ago, but to pinpoint the occasion when my Hibernophilia - which started when I was still in short trousers - began to descend a little from its apogee.
If the Argyll Arms incident introduced a new note of realism, the rise of Scottish Nationalism has certainly helped it take hold. I am not going to expound my doubts about the Nationalist cause here, save to say that the Scottish variety features the usual mixture of sentimentality and fascism - sentimentality because it relies on narratives about both past and future which are selective and therefore false, fascism because it gets a good deal of its motivation from dislike of another ethnic/cultural group, in this case the English.
But anyway, enough about chippy Jocks. What about Andy Murray?
I still managed, just about, to support the England football team this summer despite the inclusion of such unattractive people as Terry, Rooney and Ashley Cole. In tennis however, the personality of a given player matters rather more than in a team game. And Andy Murray seems such an eminently dislikeable man. His standard expression is that of someone chewing a wasp. And he was playing against Roger Federer, a man universally regarded as a gent. And in 2006 he was quoted as saying he would support "anyone but England" in the World Cup.
I would still have been quite pleased if Murray had won. But somehow I was quite pleased that he lost too.
Artists look for connections, and if it would be too much to see in Murray's emotionalism a parallel with the sentimentality of the SNP, the Final certainly added to the much-vaunted Scottish tradition of heroic defeat.
It might have served the myth better if Murray had been able to hold it together in the post-match interview by Sue Barker. I watched incredulously as the director held the camera on Murray as he stood drizzling the ground with tears. Surely they would cut away to Federer? But no.
I don't warm to Murray, but no-one deserves that. Federer had three hours to humiliate the Scot and failed. The cretinous Barker managed it within 30 seconds of handing him the microphone.
I think I would rather endure the 1990 penalty shoot-out than watch that again.
