The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.
It's a court they keep, the rest of them, and a good court, every sorrow weighed and dated and laid in its drawer — but it's not a court you're standing in now. This is the room where a man gets to his feet with the weather at the window and says: the boat is sound, and I'll tell you why, and I'll use nothing but the truth to do it, for the truth is the only timber that floats.
Haiti is winnable, and it's not the heart saying so but the arithmetic, which has no heart at all and says it anyway. Their first World Cup since 1974, that's how long the tide's been out for them. Ranked far below us. A squad gathered in from scattered leagues the way you'd gather sheep off three hillsides, and not one match played in their own country on the road here — and that's a story to take your cap off for, so it is, for it's a brave thing they've done. But brave is not the same as fearsome. Fifty years we've spent reading storms into clear skies. The team that goes out on the 13th is better, deeper, steadier than the team across the water from it, and there's no kinder way to say it and no need of one.
Morocco now, for it's Morocco that keeps the cautious awake. The semi-final, they'll say, and they're right, and it was 2022, and 2022 is a long way astern. What's in the wake that's nearer? Spain, beaten two-nothing at Hampden when nobody beyond the building believed it. Denmark, top ten in the world, beaten on the night a draw would have ended us. And Morocco champions of Africa, surely — though it's by appeals board the trophy came, not final whistle, two months after the final, in a committee room with the door shut, and the record's obliged to note it and so am I. A fine side, organised and miserly both. And it's one game. Ninety minutes on a neutral pitch, against a team that's shown — shown, not claimed — it finds its best self exactly when the alternative is home. We don't need the better of them for a generation. Once. The file says we've done harder, and lately.
And here is the heart of it, the thing the weather cannot argue with. We qualified by winning a must-win match — and it's the must-win match that every sad song in the book was written about. November. Denmark. Four goals, and the last of them hit from inside our own half, in stoppage time, with the whole long memory of this country leaning on the bar. That was not romance. That was evidence, given under lights, sworn and entered. The old curse was called to give testimony and it never left the harbour.
Will it hold across three games in America? That's the morning's question, and the advocate reserves the right to have been magnificent rather than correct. But the boat is sound. I've been out in worse with less beneath me.
The light stays on either way — and out here we know fine what a light on the water is worth.