The National:

HOW much irony can the BBC broadcast without any one of their presenters or pundits picking up on it?

That’s the question the Jouker was asking themselves this morning after watching the opening segment of the Andrew Marr Show.

The BBC’s flagship political broadcast opened, as usual, with the eponymous journalist scanning the front pages of the newspapers.

“The national [read: English] press,” Marr observed, “is pretty close to running out of red ink”.

He starts with The Sunday Times, which has unironically chosen to publish a broadsheet-sized St George’s Cross with Harry Kane over it as their entire front page.

The National:

“I wonder if that’s their opening page for Scotland as well?” he asked, adding: “Perhaps it is.”

The implication here - that it wouldn’t be a surprise for The Sunday Times to publish that front page in a country that isn’t England - should make the UK’s anglocentric media imbalance clear enough.

It apparently didn’t.

Continuing on, Marr mentioned a “suspicious number of Italian tricolores fluttering all across Scotland” before introducing a segment on The National’s Saturday front page.

READ MORE: Bitterness or banter? How the UK reacted to The National's Euro 2020 front page

Featuring Italian manager Roberto Mancini as Braveheart, the page mocked English media’s constant “greatest generation” and World War Two refrains.

“Save us from more of their nationalism being broadcast over the Border” - it ironically implored the Italian side.

It hasn’t worked yet.

Instead, we had a little lecture on why Scotland should be supporting England and not Italy from Good Morning Britain presenter Susanna Reid.

She said our front had been “playing into this idea that Scotland fans don’t want England to win the Euros”.

(Marr’s comment about Italian flags just seconds before might have been a little clue Susanna - we didn’t go around putting them up!)

The GMB presenter went on: “I know that a lot of people were upset yesterday about that front page as this England squad, this English team, represent actually the best of British.”

That Scotland and Wales were also in the tournament and quite capable of representing themselves seems to have been ignored entirely.

READ MORE: Wales team expertly taunts Tories over One Britain One Nation Day

In fact, the Welsh team made quite a splash with their open mocking of the Tories’ “One Britain One Nation”. Reid must have missed that.

Instead, she went on to describe those “British values” - which reads quite a lot like a list of how the English view themselves.

The National:

Reid (above) said: “Unity, togetherness, connectedness, community, the sort of sacrifices that families [like Raheem Sterling’s] make, the quiet stoicism of Gareth Southgate and how he represents resilience and bouncing back after failure, and all of those are values which you would hope would be celebrated across the UK.”

The clear expectation is that Scots should be celebrating and supporting England, and the outrage is centred on the fact that some are not.

Reid then looked at our Sunday National front page and the front of our Seven Days pull-out - which both feature Gerry Hassan’s essay on “a new England” - and concluded we’d had a change of heart.

“Well done, The National”, Marr said.

Thanks, you two. We do hate to burst your bubble.

READ MORE: BBC urged to stop covering football through an ‘English lens’

Many in Scotland are watching the final as you might expect a third party to - neutrally.

While understanding that Gareth Southgate is a great England manager and the tournament's outcome will have implications for English and UK society, they also understand that Mancini is perhaps the best Italy has ever had and his team is on a historic 33-game unbeaten run.

And when it comes to who many of those neutrals have decided to support, the answer is the same as it was yesterday: Viva l’Italia.