I’ve got a dirty little secret. All right I’ve got more than one. But this isn’t anything to do with breaking in to zoo enclosures in the dead of night, sneaking up on zebras and letting their haunches feel the weight of my hand. This one is even more shameful. Sickening.
When I watch England play cricket I actually want them to win.
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I’ve wrestled with it in my mind, tried to reason it away and twist logic in a similar way to a Catholic friend of mine who after an evening’s frivolities with a prostitute pointed to Mary Magdalene’s important character-defining role in The Last Temptation of Christ.
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It’s nothing to feel dirty about, you tell yourself. It’s the English and Wales Board – albeit the W somehow mysteriously got dropped from the acronym along the way. We don’t yet have Test accreditation. Scots can play for the England Test team because of laissez-faire international cricket rules that say residency is basically enough. Two England captains in the past have been Scottish and, anyway, the team is currently chock-full of blokes from Zimbabwe and South Africa.
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But then general goodwill became something else. It got taken to a whole new level. There I was, watching the start of the last day of the Second Ashes Test, the match and the plot finely poised. Freddie was ripping into the Aussies, looking like some kind of possessed dairy farmer. He steams in again, tempting Brad Haddin into a vital edge for the morning’s crucial breakthrough wicket. And there I was punching the air with both fists.
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I stopped and looked down at myself in horror. I hadn’t felt so ashamed of my hands since that whole misunderstanding with the emu puppet. I quickly hid them behind my back and felt a deep shame.
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Can it ever be acceptable for a Scot to support England? And if so should you ever admit to it in a column?
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You grow up watching En-ger-land on the sporting field with the bile steadily building in the back of your throat over the years. By the time you’re a supposedly rational-thinking adult the distaste has taken on social cleansing proportions.
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One of your good friends may be English, a stand-up guy, you don’t even consider the nationality issue. But experience them in a pub, in front of their glory boys, all cocksure and reeking of empire. And you’d happily lop off their heads with a stick. They hideously change in front of you like a bad acid trip. But then just like the old microdots, isn’t it really more to do with your own mind, your own insecurities?
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When you move abroad it’s a chance to get some perspective. The petty hatred that you spent so much of your life feeding upon all seems slightly embarrassing. For a race that’s achieved so much we end up complaining about our next door neighbours a hell of a lot.
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And you realise that people the world over, whatever nationality, can be filed into fairly similar distinct categories. The good, the bad and the c*nts.
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That’s why by the time it all gets round to Edgbaston I won’t be sitting on my hands, ashamed of my Freddie love. I’ll be hating the Aussies that live and work around me instead. Cause I ain’t got no perspective about them yet.