IF it wasn’t for the YouTube videos, I’d doubt it ever happened. I was six years old and – I think on family holiday in St Andrews – sat expectantly on front of a hotel TV set. Naturally, the memory is a bit bleary. But I’m sure I remember Craig Burley’s chip: a crucial equaliser for Scotland’s men at the France ’98 football world cup.

That was the last time Scotland scored at a major international tournament, now almost twenty years ago.

An entire generation of sports fanatics have endured a litany of glorious and not so glorious failures since then. It is with hope, and trepidation, that I suggest that will end in the next week. Scotland’s women’s football team sit on the brink of history. In their qualifying campaign for the 2017 European championship they have won five matches from five, scoring 27 goals in the process. This Friday (7pm, Falkirk stadium for £5!) their first of three crucial ties takes place. The first is against Iceland, who are also unbeaten so far. A victory for Scotland would make them odds-on to end eighteen years of footballing failure. Will they?

I think the omens are good. Exactly three years ago I was in Reykjavik. By chance this coincided with an Iceland-Scotland friendly. I wangled myself a ticket in amongst a crowd composed of around 1,000 giddy school children. I felt rather harsh celebrating as Scotland scored three times in the first half. I’ve followed them ever since.

So Scotland have had the upper hand before against Iceland, who sit one place above Scotland (20th) in the FIFA world rankings. And Scotland also have the goal scoring prowess of Kim Little, recently voted BBC Women’s Footballer of the year.

But there’s reasons to be fearful too (if you’re in the Scotland team, best skip these next few sentences). The women’s team have also made an unfortunate habit of glorious failure. Despite excellent qualifying campaigns for the 2013 and 2015 tournaments, they were knocked out in the play-offs on each occasion. Once was in the dying minutes of extra-time of the second leg against Spain.

Given the FIFA qualifying rules, a single defeat to Iceland (even when winning every other match) may relegate the women’s side into another challenging play-off match. So even with a stonking victory on Friday, Scotland’s fate won’t be known until the return match in Reykjavik on September 20.

With every other home nation qualifying for the men’s Euro 2016, Scotland has been the butt of many footballing jokes this year. But in the next week the tables could turn. It’s Scotland’s women that could end 18 years of failure. Hopefully on Friday, in their last home match of the campaign, fans will be out in force to push them towards the finishing line.


Did this gorilla have to die to save the life of a child?

WAS killing an endangered gorilla to save a child a false dichotomy?

To some, this is a frivolous question. Why are tens of thousands of people upset that zoo keepers in Cincinnati shot Herambe, a giant gorilla, dead on the pretext of saving a young child who had fallen into a moat with the animal?

With thousands of people and animals killed every day for avoidable reasons, why has this attracted such attention?

I think it’s because it represents a perfect human dilemma: what would you do?

Everyone agrees on prevention. The child’s parents should have been more careful. The zoo should have been safer. The incident should have been prevented. But it wasn’t. At that point, authorities had to make a choice: by what means would they retrieve the child?

The child, going by eyewitnesses and video footage, had been lying on the side of the water-filled moat with the gorilla without harm. After screams from onlookers, Herambe then dragged the child through the water. But there was no clear intent to cause harm.

The keepers had three choices: they could attempt to retrieve the child peacefully, they could tranquillise Herambe, or they could shoot him. They chose to shoot him dead.

Animal rights campaigners are aggrieved that the gorilla’s life was taken away without it doing anything wrong. It was an extra-judicial killing, in effect. Others sympathise with the keepers, who prioritised the life and safety of the child. They called it “a life-threatening situation”.

There is no perfect answer. But I have my doubts over how quickly US authorities rush to use violence, claiming it will protect lives and claiming no other alternatives are possible. Time after time (see Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice) police have killed innocent people out of a belief in protection.

Saving children can be the easiest circumstance to justify violence. But how many animals would we be willing to kill? How many people are we willing to kill in the belief that it saves other lives? What if – in every case – you end up justifying violence without knowing if a peaceful alternative would have been more successful?

Was killing Herambe really the only way to save the child’s life?

Michael Gray @GrayInGlasgow is a journalist with CommonSpace.scot