Back in 2006 when I lived in New York, I was part of the first annual Tartan Army Tartan Day football match between the NY Tartan Army and Tartan Army visitors. I know that there is too much ‘tartan’ in that sentence but there you go. Anyway we (the NY Tartan Army) won 4-2 that day and there is a great video of us marching through the streets of the Lower East Side to the game here.
The games have continued on an annual basis and in 2009 we even expanded the game to a 4 team 7-a-side tournament featuring the NY Tartan Army, Scotland Visitors, England and Ireland. Once again the NY Tartan Army were victorious, beating England on penalties in the final. Highlights of that tourny here.
Though the team appears to much younger and fitter now, next month the NY Tartan Army team will enter the prestigious New York Cosmos Copa tournament along with teams from the tri-state area representing 35 other nations from Afghanistan to Uruguay.
With the national team already out of the World Cup, I thought it would be good to follow the adventures of the “NYC Scotland” here on these pages. Not least because the draw was made last week putting Scotland in Group G along with Paraguay, Ghana, and England. There was a warm-up match played on Sunday in Brooklyn, more of that later, but first here is what NYC Scotland President Colin Reid had to say about the draw:
NYC Scotland will be looking to right a long-held grudge in the 2013 Cosmos Copa, following Wednesday night’s first round draw which paired the team against NYC Paraguay, NYC Gambia, and NYC England.
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“I am delighted we’ll get the chance to play Paraguay,” said NYC Scotland president Colin Reid. ”I still remember that famous game in Norkopping in the 1958 World Cup when Paraguay beat us 3-2. We were robbed!”
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“Fifty-five years later, I can recall it as if it were yesterday,” added Reid, who was born in 1970.
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NYC Gambia will be more of an unknown quantity, and Reid is hoping the team known as the ‘Scorpions’ don’t have a sting in their tail.
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“I looked that up on Wikipedia,” said Reid. “But I know the team representing the West African nation of 1.7m people, which was known as British Gambia until independence in 1965, will present a tough challenge, despite being from the smallest country in mainland Africa.”
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Gambia, like Scotland, have never qualified for the African Nations Cup.
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The other team in Scotland’s group is NYC England.
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I’ll be posting more updates here over the next few weeks and there is more info at the New York Tartan Army website. You can also follow the team at their Facebook page and on Twitter.
The full draw for the tournament is here.