One year after Joe Jordan’s ecstatic, gap-toothed holler of triumph, after scoring the goal at Hampden in 1973 to qualify Scotland for the World Cup ,after a gap of 16 years, the phrase ‘global warming’ appeared for the first time in print in the scientific journal ‘Nature’. As the scientist Wallace Smith Baeker wrote, “….the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”
So, as I churned out commentaries on the ensuing 18 World Cup Scottish games, in the Finals between 1974 and 1998, the Arctic ice was slowly melting, Alpine glaciers were receding by the centimetre, and you could eventually fry an egg on some of our streets, as we continually polluted the atmosphere in our flights around the world , in pursuance of what we really knew deep down was the impossible dream of returning with that elusive trophy. Our recurring pretensions about our own capabilities at the highest level of football, mirrored the consequent indifference to the climatic facts beginning to stare us in the face as, perhaps even more dramatically, we were awakening to the reality of global football corruption.
