The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.
There's a phrase that gets pulled out after a hard match the way a good coat gets pulled out for a funeral — not because it fits the weather, but because it's been in the family. On another day. Steve Clarke said it about the challenge on McGinn, and he said it the way men say it here, which is with complete sincerity and no expectation of ever meeting that other day in person. The claim was real. The contact was real. The official was also real, and he saw the same contact differently, and Scotland didn't score, and the scoreline that left Boston Stadium on 19 June was Morocco one, Scotland nil, a goal that arrived so fast — under two minutes gone, Saibari on the end of a Díaz pass after Hanley lost it in the wrong postcode — that the watch hands had barely moved before the damage was in. On another day, maybe. Only the catalogue of other days is long now. Long enough to build with.
The argument worth making isn't that the penalty should have been given — it should, and a braver pen than the Keeper's would've nailed it straight. The argument worth making is that on another day has become the grammar of Scottish football disappointment, not its description. It's a category now — the record says so, and the record is a careful document. Respectably unlucky. The decision that goes elsewhere in the world. The other day that doesn't show up on the fixture list. What started as a way of holding the head up has become the architecture itself, and architecture has to be inspected before you stand under it, especially when it's old. The nine appearances at World Cup finals — ninth, this one — have accumulated this phrase like a building accumulates damp: slowly, invisibly, until one morning the walls are carrying it instead of the other way around.
Here is what doesn't fit the architecture, though, and it's the piece of evidence that makes the case worth making. Denmark, four-two, stoppage time, McLean's goal coming out of his own half like it had been waiting the whole campaign for permission. That was not on another day. That was that day, the one day, the exactly right November evening, and it arrived because Scotland played well enough and long enough and brave enough to force it into existence. Morocco held the ball for three-quarters of the first half — seventy-eight percent possession — and Scotland stayed in shape and created and found their best work late, and the difference between the game and the result was not fortune but one goal, scored in seventy seconds before most of the watching world in Scotland had lifted the first cup of tea. There's no other day to invoke there. There's only pace and a defensive error and the speed of a fine side when you give them the first touch of the ball. That's not fate. That's Morocco.
So here is the dissenting view, and it is this: stop mourning the other day and start building the actual one. The penalty claim travels to Miami. The defeat travels to Miami. The record — Scotland in nine World Cup campaigns, never beyond the group stage, and here again with the group alive and Brazil still to come on 24 June — that travels too. What doesn't have to travel is the habit of settling for dignified disappointment as though dignity were the prize. It isn't the prize. Brazil at Hard Rock Stadium, and the door is still — no, not the door, not that word. The group is not closed. Scotland are second on merit — one win, one loss, one game remaining — and if the arithmetic is uncomfortable that's no argument against doing the arithmetic. A refereeing decision didn't beat Scotland. A goal in the seventy-first second and a team that held what it had beat Scotland. Both of those things are answerable with football.
The other day the phrase keeps promising? It was never a day on the calendar. It was always a vote of no confidence dressed in good manners. The next day is 24 June. That's the one worth keeping faith with.