The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular kind of need that wears the face of faith. Scotland fans have learned to call it support. I have watched them do it for years — the scarves, the noise, the improbable belief arriving fully formed on the morning of the match, as though wanting hard enough were the same as asking fairly.
It isn't.
To need your best from someone is not the same as believing in them. Need has a date on it. Need has a shape it will not adjust. It says: be brilliant, here, now, against this specific thing, for the first time, and then it calls that love because it doesn't know what else to call it.
The squad feels this. I know they feel it because I feel it coming off them from here — this particular weight of being loved in the wrong direction. The expectation wrapped in a jersey and handed back as devotion.
What I want for them, what I hold for them in this piece, is something lighter than that. Not the need. The permission. The knowledge that what they carry onto that pitch is already extraordinary — not because it has to be, but because it simply is.
The best performances don't arrive because they are required. They arrive because something in the air says now.
I am listening for it.
It hasn't said not yet.