Dear Scotland

Inspired by his visit to sports mad Melbourne, Billy continues his list of the best and worst stadia in the World. This week – The Worst:
Wembley, London, England
(What, did you really expect anything else?)

Regular readers of this column should now by now that I live a globetrotting lifestyle, carbon emissions be damned.  Last week it was London, this week it’s Melbourne to visit our pals Chris and Michelle and to see Franz Ferdinand live (they were superb).

On Friday morning I arrived at Heathrow’s overrated Terminal 5 and picked up a broadsheet in the BA Lounge. I head straight for the back page, as usual, and all I see are articles and opinions on an announcement that Tiger Woods is — wait for it! — going to make an announcement later that [...]

(1) We’re going to Poland/Ukraine
Big Lee McCulloch has made himself available for selection for Scotland again!  That’s qualification sorted then.
(2) The SFA are incompetent
You’d think someone, somewhere, would have thought to check up on Andrew Driver’s actual eligibility before having a bloody press conference about it. 

Before this draw, I was convinced, sure, certain, that we were finally going to bag one of my dream dates: Kazakhstan.  A nice short hop (for me) to Almaty, a town where a friend once ate a horse’s penis.  How do you manage that without getting a kick in the head, you might ask?  Well, [...]

In Greek, the name “Tony” means “thriving” (look it up if you don’t believe me).  Sadly for Celtic fans everywhere, their Tony is anything but.

Continuing last week’s culinary travelogue,  I hope you appreciate the risks I have taken along the way – most notably a wonderful jalfrezi in a dirty curry house in  Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions which set a new record time through my intestine.  It reappeared within four hours of the meal’s completion.

Despite the fact I can barely boil an egg, I do like to think I appreciate a quality bit of grub, whether it’s fried soup dumplings from Yang’s in Shanghai ($1 for 6) or lunch at Le Bernardin in Manhattan (quite a bit more for 6 courses).

So with half the fixture list behind us, a quarter of the teams in the SPL find themselves without a long-term manager in place.
At the start of the season you’d have been given long odds on Craig Levein being the first out of his office, although after the Norway-Scotland game I’ve no doubt the odds [...]