Watching the World Cup, Part 2
How Scottish can a New Yorker really be?
Part two of a series about watching the 2026 Fifa World Cup. Each new section will be released every few days.
Scotland vs Haiti 06/13
I’d spent most of the day in a shared makeshift cabin perched atop a cliff overlooking the Cordillera Central, the central region of the Andes, recovering from the previous night, my first Ayahuasca ceremony, where with demonic brutality I puked and shat the equivalent to Lionel Messi’s bodyweight. There were some hallucinations, but the initial experience was far less psychological, visual, esoteric, and far more physical, laboring, if not outright masochistic than I’d initially expected. In the morning we had a workshop where we all held a candle and each bit of wax that dripped represented an episode from the past we wished to let go of, be released from (prior events themselves, in the abstract theory of memory, otherwise known as various levels of trauma, can have quite a grip on the sensibilities of the present). With every bit of wax that fell to the floor we were encouraged to scream, scream as loud as we could with our eyes closed firm and mouths open wide. No one lives around the compound, we were told. Do not make’a like you holding back. Malparida hijueputa. An opportunity presented itself to really fooking let it rip. I didn’t scream as loud as I should have and instead found myself annoyed that my hands were covered in wax. In the end, as half the room, elated, began crying and vomiting and holding one another, I began to think of Scotland vs Haiti; this, a big deal, Scotland in the World Cup. The last time they were there was 1998, when I was four years old, and no amount of ayahuasca would help me recall a moment of those games (two losses, one draw). I’m Scottish on my father’s side, as you might’ve guessed from my name. But I’m a Scottish Jew, which means, in respect to both blood and lineage and in some sense to the bizarre trappings of culture and identity, I’m more Jewish than Scottish. My grandfather was born in London and my grandmother in Birmingham, and the generations before them came from along the Rhine River, like all Ashkenazi Jews in Europe. So as an adult in fear of shopping for an artificial persona, a bullshit identity that’s anything but grounded in reality, I choose to not walk around and consider myself Scottish, and I haven’t, since my early teenage years, purchased any Scottish football jerseys or memorabilia. If anything, I made the choice to distance myself as much as I could from The Auld Country. Through experience I came to the conclusion, in adulthood, that Scotland is a land full of pasty, violent, and repressed people who only find comfort and safety by standing in-line at a shop called Asda; there’s nothing scarier on earth than a skinhead twenty-three-year-old who lives in a council estate near Paisley sitting on a bus alone at three pm in the afternoon, basking in the ever-endless pain of youthful frustration. But, Gordon, what about the… yeah, OK, the north of Scotland is beautiful, but it’s no more beautiful than what can be found in Scandinavia, Ireland, or the Balkans, and I’d rather go to one of those, or one of them, as a true Scot might say.
Still, I’d spend my childhood summers in Giffnock, East Renfrewshire, where my father was born and raised, a relatively affluent Jewish suburb of Glasgow (at one point in time it had a Whole Foods), being yelled at by my grandfather for not sitting still and asking for too much ice cream, a ninety-nine, a vanilla soft serve with a Cadbury Flake lodged on top, and being blatantly, shamelessly, lied to by my grandmother—we can’t go to the candy shop because it closed, the park is closed, the toy store has, it’s a shame, closed, the zoo, what a coincidence, has also gone and closed. My grandmother, Audrey, had no idea that at eight years old I was smart enough to know that things, all the things I wanted to do that might be of inconvenience to an adult, don’t just magically, at once, forever shut their doors on the same day. Another memory I have is of my Grandfather, Tony, at the age of seventy-three, being caught redhanded in a decades-long affair with his neighbor, Judy Brody, during the unpleasant and muggy August bank holiday weekend. This was great drama that, at twelve-years-old, I didn’t really mind witnessing. I have very pleasant memories of Scotland too, but they, more or less, all have to do with football: my father and family friends taking me to Parkhead to watch games like Celtic vs Barcelona, where I saw a team consisting of a twenty-year-old Lionel Messi, Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Carles Puyol, Deco, Andres Iniesta, and Gabriel Milito, among others, beat Celtic 3-2 on a frigid February night in the Champions League Round of 16; among the greatest memories of my childhood, at least from a level of pure, unadulterated joy. Football was how, at least as a kid, I was able to convince myself that Scotland was not a very depressing place filled with bigamist elderlies and depressive bus-riding skinheads and ice cream shops and zoos that close on a moment’s notice, but actually a place where happiness could be found through sport, through football, through the sheer pleasure of spectacle and escapism; it’s an incredibly quotidian, dumb, yet extraordinary concept, entering a destination in order to escape.
The second ayahuasca ceremony on the evening of Saturday, June 13th was scheduled for eleven pm and would be proceeded by a seven pm supper of saltine crackers and bananas followed by a bout of singing pious songs in Spanish regarding faith and hope and misery and pain and the endless capacity to take it all in and mix it all up and eventually use it to experience joy on a near-constant, enlightened level, together round the campfire. While I enjoyed the singing bit, listening to it in particular, I spent most of the pre-ceremony in the cabin holding my iPad, preparing to watch Scotland’s first World Cup appearance in twenty-eight years. The game before was Brazil vs. Morocco, one of the group stage’s “marquee match-ups,” as the commentators kept repeating. I was more interested in watching Brazil vs Morocco because it was the first game in the tournament to take place in New York, and I was curious to see what changes they made to the stadium—not much other than removing all Metlife branding in favor of large New York/New Jersey Stadium signposts, and replacing the turf football field with a silky grass pitch that’d been cultivated in North Carolina and Colorado over the course of eight years. Morocco, the stronger side, took the lead with a stunning first-half goal, a subtle lob over Alison, Brazil’s keeper, before, with some individual brilliance, Vinicius Jr. equalized. Not much else occurred. A Brazilian fan and a Moroccan fan kissed in the stands while a young mixed-race kid looked ahead. I fell asleep and woke up to the final 1-1 score. Scotland, in Boston, was scheduled to start in an hour’s time. But I could only watch, at most, the first forty-five minutes, as I had to get down to the fire-pit for at least the last hour of pre-ceremony singing and dancing, pre-ceremony mental preparation, pre-ceremony tobacco smoking. After all, I hadn’t traveled all the way to Colombia to drink a mind-altering indigenous medicine so I could lie in bed and watch Scotland play Haiti in Boston… in Boston. At that point I was already sick of the numerous reports of Scottish fans “taking over Beantown,” numerous pudgy red-faced proletariats who’d spent their life-savings (an average of three thousand dollars per ticket) to go to Foxboro and, reportedly drain the city of all its beer and fast food. I found it disgusting, something that had the ability to make me puke more than the ayahuasca itself.
Before the game started, taking full advantage of my ninety dollar hotspot, I video-called my mom who had, in the midst of her own cancer-treatment, driven over to the nursing home in Los Angeles where my father “lives,” or more dwells, following an unfortunate multi-year battle with Lewy Body Dementia. He doesn’t know what day or time it is and often forgets me and my sisters’ names but, according to my mother, was able to fully register that Scotland, on that day, would be playing their opening game of the World Cup. And on the FaceTime she was there, sitting beside him in his room with a small Scotland flag, as the players walked out onto the pitch to the sound of Shakira’s Dai Dai, which, like a cock in a German nightclub, was already being forced down our throats in every possible direction, several times in quick succession. If I was to watch the World Cup with any sense of happiness or peace, I would have to get used to this AI generated anthem celebrating the multiculti nature of contemporary sport.
“Who’s that?” My mom, a New Yorker, not a Scot, said, pointing to John McGinn, Scotland’s talismanic center-midfielder. “Oh wow, he’s ugly.” Yes. “And wait,” my mom said again. “Who’s that?”… pointing to Lawrence Shankland, Scotland’s relatively unknown starting center-forward. “Oh my God,” she giggled. “He’s so ugly.” This went on for another few minutes, before the camera pivoted to Andy Robertson, the Champions League winning left-fullback and vice-captain of Liverpool FC: “oh, he, he’s not that strange looking.” Eventually she pivoted the camera to my father, who, shortly after kickoff, had already fallen asleep. “I’ll call you later when he wakes up. Where are you, by the way?”
“Upstate, hiking.”
“Oh, OK, OK, enjoy. If I don’t reach you I’ll try calling tomorrow.”
Shortly after the last kick of a ball at the tournament, Anantaajith Raghuraman, a staff writer for the New York Times, made a list that ranked each of the World Cup’s 104 games in terms of quality and excitement. And the first entry on the list, all the way down at number 104… Group C, Haiti 0-1 Scotland “Congratulations to Scotland on a first World Cup win in 36 years but a game with 44 fouls and four shots on target (from 24 attempts) was never going to rank too highly here.”
For the last ten minutes of the first-half, with Scotland already one nil up, I began getting ready for the evening, packing in a small black rucksack several woolen and cotton sweaters; I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I had trouble parting ways from the game. I didn’t find it as poor a spectacle as Raghuraman did, and I’d definitely be able to make a good argument that other games should receive the unforgiving label of worst of the tournament, but, thinking further, it’s true I wasn’t really watching the game as some kind of passive spectator. There was, it can’t be denied, a semi-conscious and intense, perverse emotional bias.
The description of your grandmother's lies- hilarious!