Date: 27th November 2025

Coming Doon the Road

Donald C Stewart

If you cut me in half, I bleed black and white. I follow the Tam Cowan rule as to who I should support. That is, you take a map and a ruler, and you find your house and you draw a line from that to the nearest stadium and that therefore is the team you support.

Ayr United has always been my team, always will be.

For some, no me, that means that the rivalry with Kilmarnock is something that can often define people’s support for their hometown club in Ayrshire.

When Steve Clarke was announced as the Kilmarnock manager, he came in with little fanfare, but what he did over that period of time was just simply remarkable. It pains me to admit it, but Ayrshire was enlivened by the impact he made.

Of course, every time that he put a team out, there were people at Somerset Park who wanted him to fail because he was the Killie manager.

Our rivalry, sometimes bitter, often just ludicrous and hilarious, kept it simmering.

When he became the Scotland manager, I thought it was the greatest appointment that the SFA had made in a long time.

I hold the view, that having a former Celtic or Rangers manager or the manager of any other big club doesn’t work for Scotland.

Scotland is not like Rangers or Celtic.

We are not dominant in our field. We are certainly not minnows, but we’re also not sharks.

Steve Clarke has managed something no other Scottish manager has done.

He has done so by understanding how international competition works.

When you’re a manager of a top club, what you expect is that every single time you put a team out, you’re going to win. That winning mentality is something that week on week ensures dominant success and keeps your fans on side.

During this particular short sprint, Scotland has managed to keep alive a dream, which at many points, looked as though it was all just that, a dream, and it was going to end as an ever present and all too frequent nightmare.

Scotland has probably been pretty decent at sprints, given Alan Wells’ victory in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, or Duncan Scott’s performance in the pool, but this short campaign of six games, over two months (the playoffs look longer!) has cemented a legacy for Clarke. And rightly so.

We can think back to that night in Serbia, the game against Switzerland in the last Euros, or the 2-0 win against Spain at Hampden.

It’s all been just remarkable.

Hyperbole is being offered up to describe the win against Denmark, but mere words don’t do it justice.

The four goals that were scored, aside from poor Laurence Shankland’s tap-in, are probably the best that have been seen in that stadium for a long time.

It is arguable that Zinedine Zidane’s goal has been eclipsed not once, not twice, but three times, m’laddie.

We are on our way to the World Cup, and the party atmosphere is on its way. In the year that Ricky Hatton took his own life his time in Vegas was typified by his fans arriving there and drinking the whole town dry. America is about to see that on steroids.

The Scottish fans are going to make an incredible impression, just like they did in Germany.

It’s going to be a mad buildup and expect madcap and crazy antics as we remember the supporters who talked about hiring a submarine to get to Argentina, or the very real journey in a rickety bus.

They have followed the national team with the same faith that Clarke, sticking to the method of building a team around experience and multi-capped players, have done. Clarke had his doubters after the last European Championship. Then we got two very strange victories against Belarus and Greece: games in which we played so poorly that everybody feared the worst.

But Clarke kept faith with his players. He trusted his players.

And talking of players, a word about Diego Jota. In his post-team interview with the BBC, Andy Robertson talked of his dear friend, and how they spoke of both going to a World Cup. Now Roberston can go and Jota is unable. It was an emotional tribute and one fitting of the occasion. I have little doubt that some fans will seek to mark that with something, but Neil McCann followed the interview with talk of seeing the human side of sports stars.

At any point that there is a defeat, keyboard warriors are on, piling abuse and nonsense on the heads of human beings. That’s why some sports stars don’t have any profile on social media: they can’t cope with it. What we can cope with is the humility that they bring and that should be given a moment in its own sunshine – or the earthquake of Hampden when nearly 50,000 fans celebrate on the Richter Scale!

Footballers are human. But for one night, they became superhuman.

And we are on our way to the World Cup.

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Posted in: Fan's Blog, Latest News

Tags: oor Donald, Scotland, SFA, World Cup