Try as he might, there are some things Rory Hamilton just can’t prepare for.
Only so many scenarios footballing scenarios are creditable to the imagination, and seven days ago in the heat of Oslo was not one of them. But that’s what this Scotland team are doing, ripping up torturously ingrained beliefs that scoring twice in the final three minutes to win a difficult qualifier away from home simply does not happen for us.
The sound of what that feels like was beautifully captured by Viaplay’s voice of the national team and colleague Michael Stewart when Kenny McLean swept a most unlikely winner into the Norway net. Not conventionally beautiful, perhaps, but the kind of joyful noise that only football can draw from grown men, so unique and unmistakable yet absolutely not reproducible in print, so I won’t bother trying.
“Sometimes you just need to lose yourself and allow your own emotions to go wild,” said Hamilton. “You hope the words that come out your mouth make sense!
“It probably wasn’t textbook commentary but part of it is being emotionally invested in the game. Having followed Scotland for so long, I was celebrating as much as anyone else.
“We had these headset microphones, so the mic is attached to the headphones. By the time the game kicked off again, my lip mic was round the back of my ear because we’d been jumping around so much.
“You can’t plan for moments like that. A lot of the time before games I try and take myself on a walk up in the hills to try and envisage different scenarios.
“It’s not so you can script or overly prepare but to just imagine what might happen in certain scenarios and how you might react. It mentally prepares you for eventualities.
“I never came up with that one in my head! To be one down with three minutes and score twice, it was incredible scenes.”
Hamilton first ventured abroad to follow Scotland in 2006, so if there’s anyone who felt the emotion of the Ulleval Stadium’s away end, it’s him. Coherently conveying to the nation what’s happening in front of them whilst fighting to retain control of the senses can’t be easy when you’ve personally suffered through so many nights of pain on the Tartan Army’s frontline.
That being said, people can tell when supposedly candid reactions stray into pre-rehearsed monologues, something that can pull a viewer right out of the moment when they’re supposed to be immersed in it. But I dare anybody to listen back to the moment McLean struck and deny that the men behind the mic were not accurately recreating the scenes unfolding in the pubs and living rooms back home.
It must be a key skill for the commentator, being ready for whatever comes your way yet still allowing it to take you along with it.
“That’s exactly it,” said Hamilton. “Moreso when you’re covering the national team, because you’re broadcasting to an audience who are essentially all Scotland fans and probably want more passion and emotion.
“In domestic club games, you’ve got to be a bit more reserved because it could be 50-50 or even 70-30. But you always remember that the people watching are completely immersed in the outcome of that result and that’s always been something for me.
“It leads to almost every game you do that someone will accuse you of being a fan of whatever team is playing, generally whatever team wins. That’s something I’ve always thought is because the people watching at home are so emotionally invested in it, even if it’s a boring game or one where you don’t care about the outcome, you still need to see it through their eyes.
“As a commentator, you have to be a fan of everyone and no one to bring across those feelings that people have watching it.”
Fast forward fewer than three days and we’d gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. I’d estimate it took less than a minute from Scotland kicking off against Georgia on Tuesday to conclude the Hampden pitch was in a bit of bother.
It was so painfully Glaswegian summer that it felt almost a bit too on the nose, suddenly flipping from eternal sunshine to what was apparently six days’ worth of rain pelting down in the space of just a few hours. Aaron Hickey had the ball taken off him by a puddle, another very nearly helped turn a Georgian shot into the back of Angus Gunn’s net. The obligatory VAR check after Callum McGregor’s opening goal was more an opportunity for the referee to get a handle on events rapidly descending into farcical territory.
What followed was a mix of confusion, bemusement, dread and some inspired song choices from the Hampden DJ as we entered a roughly 90 minute delay. For those of us press just sitting behind laptops, it was a simple case of sitting tight until the game does or does not restart, but that’s not really an option on live TV.
It’s the scenario that must infiltrate a broadcaster’s bad dream on occasion – the requirement to fill time in front of the nation as you rapidly run out of things to talk about. That unenviable task was shared between Hamilton, Stewart and their pitchside colleagues Emma Dodds, Alan Hutton, Kevin Thomson and Connie McLaughlin.
“It was so strange,” Hamilton said. “We’re not necessarily getting any more information than the fans and I think I said on air that you’re trying to read the body language of the referees to see how they’re interacting with their assistants, the managers and the players.
“Very occasionally, we had some news filtering through, and at times it was ‘the game isn’t going ahead but don’t put that out on air’ then it would change to ‘actually, it’s looking good now!’
“It was really tricky for Emma, Alan and Kev and they did a brilliant job. They had Connie down there as well, heading up the tunnel looking for information.
“The guys out in the trucks aren’t getting information either. It’s just trying to put on a viable piece of broadcasting and Emma held it together so, so well.
“We tried to share stints but Emma definitely took the brunt of it. You don’t know how long it’s going to be, so you just have to start talking and keep going.
“Remember, they’ve already previewed the game for half an hour so you can’t really go back over that stuff. Inevitably there’ll be things you go back to when the mind ends up a little bit blank.
“Michael and I, once the ref came off to chat we filled for about 10 minutes and midway through they threw back to us to give Emma, Alan and Kevin a bit of a break. We maybe did 15 minutes there.
“They came back to us about five past nine when Scotland came out to warm up again because it looked like we were going to restart again, but of course it didn’t kick off until about 9.35 so there was even more extra time.
“A lot of bosses I’ve had have given me advice that less is more; you don’t always have to say something to fill silence, a crowd can dictate and narrate a game for you. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t bother… but at moments like that you don’t have a choice, you have to keep saying things!
“Michael and I were even analysing the technique of the guys with the squeegees, you really go right to the depths of what you can talk about.
“There were a couple of them down in front of us and must have forearms and biceps like tree trunks now because they were putting in some effort to get that water off the pitch. It was amazing.”
In the end, it was worth the wait.
Scotland swept to a fourth consecutive victory that puts Steve Clarke and his players on the precipice of Euro 2024 qualification. Since Viaplay acquired exclusive broadcasting rights to the national team, Hamilton has had a front row seat to a quite incredible run, sparked by two painful defeats to Ukraine and the Republic of Ireland.
He still misses his seat in the north stand at times, and the away days he’s been embarking on for almost two full decades are distinctly more professional these days. Personally, Hamilton has come a long way since working as a teacher in Guyana and cutting replays for Scotsport on STV, seizing his chance to get behind the mic after joining Setanta and refusing to look back from then on.
‘It was and it wasn’t a dilemma to cover the games’, he admits, but it did mean getting closer to the action than ever during a 12 months that now feel like a tectonic shift in our collective psyche around watching the national team.
But as someone who has seen it all with Scotland, is this just a particularly purple patch or have we really, finally gone to another level?
“We’ve definitely gone up a level,” he said decisively. “We have a very good team. It’s not an elite team, it’s not you’d expect to be sitting on four wins from four to start a campaign when you look at the other teams who have done it – England, France, we’re not at that level.
“But we have very good players and an extremely good manager, who has them well drilled. That also takes the players buying into what he wants and trust it’s the right thing to do.
“They’re also a very approachable group with plenty of good talkers, which is great from a broadcasting point of view. We’ve had quite a lot come into the studio to chat after games.
“They’re friendly and they talk honestly. It’s interesting because Steve Clarke is quite a guarded guy, and I wonder if they’ve looked at how England have dealt with the media in recent years.
“From the 2018 World Cup in Russia, that was one of the strong points they had; Gareth Southgate really wanted to show the human side of his players. I think that helped a lot with media perception of the England team.
“It may not be something Scotland have concerned themselves with at all, maybe it’s just football modernising a little bit. We’ve gone through spells where players are told: ‘Give the media nothing, they’re the enemy.’
“It’s clearly a load of rubbish and it helps the individuals if they can show their human side. I think that’s helped.
“It doesn’t change what happens on the pitch but it does help drive a good opinion of the group of players and keeps building that optimism going forward.”
Optimism and Scotland, it might finally be about to catch on.
