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A Scottish sports journalist who has spent more than four decades living and working in England admits his feelings about England football are deeply complicated.
Keith Webster was born in Glasgow in the mid-1960s at 5 Claremont Terrace, just north of Sauchiehall Street, and grew up a regular at the Rock Garden and Maestro’s.
He moved south of the border in 1986, driven by a search for work during Maggie Thatcher’s Britain, building a career in sports journalism across Oxford, Birmingham and London.
His daughter, son and three granddaughters are all English, and his colleagues, neighbours and friends are largely English after more than 40 years on Anglican soil.
Yet every major football tournament drags him back to the same uncomfortable question of whether he is supposed to cheer or quietly seethe when England win.
His earliest wound came on May 27, 1972, when his father took him to Hampden as a seven-year-old, only for Alan Ball to force home a scruffy goal that left him crying all the way out of the stadium.
The sharpest cut of all came on June 15, 1996, when Paul Gascoigne scored that goal at Wembley, and Webster — seated in an England section — felt someone spit directly on the back of his head.
Before even reaching the stadium that day, he had been involved in a brawl at Marylebone Station and cornered in an empty train carriage by 14 skinheads until a single English police officer intervened and saved him.
Two decades later, the wounds resurfaced in his local pub, the Nightingale in Bicester, Oxfordshire, during the Scotland versus England World Cup qualifier, when Leigh Griffiths’ second free-kick beat Joe Hart.
“I did a knee slide in the pub, forgetting that the floor was carpet,” Webster recalls, with the burns on his knees made worse moments later when Harry Kane scored with the last kick of the game.
Webster also recalls an English journalist who worked in Glasgow and would deliberately stop his petrol pump at nineteen pounds and 66 pence so a Scottish attendant would have to say the year England won the World Cup.
England’s 1966 triumph came one week before Webster’s second birthday, and he notes it has now been 60 years of celebration, which remains the central reason Scottish fans have always dreaded England winning it again.
His grand uncle served at Passchendaele in 1917 and his grandfather at St Valery in 1940, proof enough that shared history runs far deeper than any football rivalry ever could.
Webster says he has learned that England fans can be arrogant, but acknowledges that Scottish fans are no different, and that arrogance is not unique to either side of the border.
His conclusion is not bitterness but a clear-eyed realism — he is not a member of the anti-England club, but remains a committed member of the pro-Scotland brigade, still dreaming of that fantasy final.
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