Dear Scotland

Fox News TV celebrity and all-round fruit loop Glenn Beck held a rally for his followers in Washington DC last Saturday.  The date just happened to be August 28, the same date that Martin Luther King held his famous “March on Washington,” the culmination of which was his legendary “I Have A Dream” speech.

Scottish football was rocked to its core on Sunday following the Hibernian-Rangers match at Easter Road – a match which featured two red cards and a blatant act of simulation.
One senior figure in Scottish sport, who would only be quoted off-the-record, stated: “There is no place for that type of behaviour in Scotland’s elite league. [...]

The start of the season is now upon us, and if you’re like me that means a return to the weekly ritual of match day. Over the years I’ve found a few things to enhance the experience of being a Scottish football supporter – here are a half-dozen ideas for you.

Today is the Glorious Twelfth — the beginning of the shooting season for red grouse.  There’s no equivalent name for the start of the Scottish football calendar — Sensational Saturday? — but this weekend sees the twelve powers of the Scottish Premier League re-align for another smashing season of soccer.  Read on for a dozen [...]

I often tell people one of the benefits of being a Rangers fan is that you get two occasions every week to be happy: Rangers winning and Celtic losing.  Celtic’s defeat to Sporting Braga in the first round of the Champions League qualifier gave Rangers fans even further satisfaction – not only did Celtic lose [...]

James Curran Baxter was born in 1939 in Hill of Beath, Fife.  He played 381 games for Raith Rovers, Rangers, Sunderland, Nottingham Forest, and Scotland, scoring 38 goals, including both in the 1963 win at Wembley – the stadium where, four years later, he played “keepie uppie” against the newly-crowned world champions.  Baxter retired from [...]

Back in the mid-90s, before Mrs Williamson was a snowboarder, we’d often spend the Martin Luther King long weekend (mid-January) flying down to Miami and hanging out in South Beach.  It was a fine break from the freezing New York winters and allowed me to transform my pasty white skin into a marginally less pasty [...]

My tournament began in the conference room of a fund management company on George Street in Edinburgh: I had travelled through from Glasgow for the day to visit a friend who had invited me to watch South Africa-Mexico on an extremely large flat screen TV in his office.  A month later, I staggered out of [...]

This is the first in an occasional series where we will take a match result and look at memorable games in Scottish history with that result.  This week: games that ended 4-1:
1882 Scottish Cup Final: Queen’s Park 4 Dumbarton 1 (after 2-2 draw)