The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.
There is a machine in this country, and it runs on a single fuel, and what it does is take the best player available and load him until he bends, and then it files the bending under disappointment. The Index has named it, fair enough — the gap between projection and permission, which is a careful way of saying Scotland built a stage, handed McTominay the light, and is now wondering why the lighting rig is showing. But the Index, constitutional in its neutrality, won't tell you whose fault the gap is. That's fine. That's what this room is for. The fault is the projection's, and the projection's alone, and the case is simple enough to make with the window open and the facts laid on the table where anyone can check them.
McTominay arrived at this World Cup a Champions League finalist with Napoli — not a promise, not a projection, an achievement, solid and weighed and sitting there in the record. He has played two games. In the first, Scotland won. In the second, Morocco won the possession battle so completely — near enough four-fifths of the ball in the first half — that asking any single midfielder to impose himself on the game was like asking a man to hold a door open in a gale: the asking is the category error. He did not fail against Morocco. The pitch offered him no ground to stand on. The narrative needed a defining moment; the game did not provide the conditions for one. These are different problems, and only one of them belongs to him. Baxter in 1967, Dalglish in 1978, McLeish in 1990, Lambert in 1998 — the record's been keeping this file longer than any of us have been reading it, and every entry reads the same: adequate performance, logged as dereliction. The machine doesn't break down between editions. It just needs feeding.
Here is the thing that gets lost when the retrospective calibration pieces start filing. The projection was built on club form that was real. A Champions League final is not a rumour. The expectation that this form would translate — tournament, new system, group-stage pressure — wasn't irrational; it was just premature. Two games. Against Haiti, a win, a clean sheet, a squad finding its feet on American soil for the first time in twenty-eight years. Against Morocco, a loss measured in seconds — Saibari's goal the fastest of the tournament so far, scored before the crowd had stopped rustling, from a defensive lapse that had nothing to do with the midfield. You could make the case that McTominay has not yet been given the match he would recognise. Brazil in Miami on the 24th — a game where Scotland will have to come out, will have to attack, will have to find him in the space between lines rather than penned in behind the ball — that's the game the projection was actually written for. The machine filed it early.
Brazil will ask the question the tournament hasn't asked yet. Scotland need a result, and needing a result opens the game, and an open game is where McTominay lives — the late run, the pass that breaks the line, the goal that arrives as if it was always going to. He scored the goal against England at Wembley that had the country half-off its seat. He is not a man who performs under no pressure; he is a man who performs under the right kind. Hard Rock Stadium, the third game, everything still possible — that is not a reduced stage. That is the exact stage the projection was describing. It just turns out it's in Miami, not in the first forty minutes of a night game in Foxborough with Morocco sitting on eighty percent of the ball.
Hold the faith. The case was never closed.