Scotland’s national sport is football – that is the sport that some countries call soccer.
We used to be really good at football, probably because we have been playing it for such a long time. Mary, Queen of Scots (1542 – 1587) is said to have enjoyed playing an early version of football. My own favourite team – Celtic – were once the champions of Europe.
The trouble is, Scotland is a small country. And once every other country in the world started playing football, we became less and less successful at it. After 23 years of trying and failing to reach a major tournament, Scotland’s men’s national team qualified for this year’s European Championship. We had home advantage at our first game, which we nevertheless lost on Monday to the Czech Republic. So it is more melancholy for us.
100 years ago Scotland was a big fish in a little footballing pond. As the popularity of football has grown around the world, we now find ourselves to be a little fish in a huge ocean. So I would like to suggest that Scotland stops trying to do well at football, and finds a less popular sport. If our country of 5 million people put all of its effort into producing competitive trampolinists, we could be confident of being the best in the world. A trampolinist in a well knows nothing of the wide ocean (as long as he doesn’t jump all the way to the top of the well).
I think this is true, not just for
countries, but for individuals. Why
learn the piano? You will have to
compete against millions of pianists for attention. Wouldn’t it be better to be the best bongo
player in Tokyo?
Vocabulary/ notes:
to have home advantage – in a sporting
contest, to host the match at your own local ground
melancholy – a persistently gloomy state of
mind; a feeling of being down or depressed
“A trampolinist in a well…” – A well is a
hole dug into the ground to find drinking water, which can be pulled up with a
bucket. this is based upon the Japanese
proverb, “A frog in a well knows nothing of the great ocean.”
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