The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.
The case against Scotland and the heat goes like this: we are a people of the horizontal rain, of pitches that drain slowly, of pre-season friendlies played in a wind that makes the ball do things no coaching manual has accounted for — and now they ask us to step out into thirty degrees of American June and press a Moroccan midfield for ninety minutes. That's the prosecution's opening and it's a decent one. Wullie grants it freely, because the advocate who won't concede the obvious is the one the jury stops listening to. The domestic calendar does not build men for Foxborough in June. Steve Clarke has said as much, in the language of a man who knows exactly where the gaps are and is filling them anyway. All of that's in the file. Here's what else is in the file.
What the record actually shows is that Scotland have never been destroyed by a variable — they've been destroyed by the familiar. The weather at Wembley in '96 was fine. The pitch at Saint-Étienne was fine. The temperature in Cologne was fine. The disasters were made of something closer to home: the penalty, the failure to hold, the goal that came one minute too late or one minute too early. All our worst nights have been meteorologically unremarkable. The heat, then, is new territory — and new territory is precisely where a team carrying the weight of a known curse has the best chance of not re-enacting it. Morocco won't find a script here. Neither will the ones who've been writing Scotland's ending since before the squad was named.
And here is where the argument turns and becomes something else entirely. Scotland beat Haiti 1-0 in heat. Not Glaswegian heat — this heat, America's heat, the same air that hangs over Foxborough tonight. They managed their shape, they held their discipline, they kept a clean sheet, they scored when it mattered. The acclimatisation wasn't theoretical; it happened, in a competitive match, with a result attached. One game is a small sample and Wullie knows it. But small samples matter when the question being asked is whether we can survive the conditions at all — and the answer already given, under tournament pressure, against a team that was not obliging us, is: yes, and one-nil.
Morocco are a magnificent side and this column will not pretend otherwise. Organised, disciplined, built for exactly the kind of game that heat encourages — slower, more positional, where the side that conserves the sharper mind in the second half tends to take the second half. The question of how Scotland press in thirty degrees is real. But Clarke has read the same question and he has seventeen days of preparation that we're not privy to, and a squad that ran through Denmark in November on nothing but belief and the thing that lives in the chest when elimination is an hour away. That thing doesn't have a temperature rating. It runs hot by nature.
Raise a glass that's cold, because the night will be warm and the occasion warrants it. The weather is not the adversary. The adversary is Morocco, on a pitch in Massachusetts, at twenty-three hundred hours BST, and Scotland go out to meet them in form, acclimatised, and carrying a result. Thirty degrees is a condition, not a conclusion — and we have already played one game in it and the right side won.