Just to set the record straight 0.9% of English fans were arrested but I agree that's a tiny minority.
Would Scotland have had 85,000 fans at the cup if we had qualified? I doubt it but remember that Celtic took 45,000 to Portugal for the European Cup or what ever its now called a couple of years ago and that's just one club. I think Scotland may have a higher per capita attendance than England though if you remember that more poeple live in London that in the whole of Scotland.
To get back to the root cause though. It's not the English we don't like (I married a lovely English girl). It's the media as Andy pointed out. We are patriotic but no more so that the English. It's just that the English doesn't had to put up with being called Scottish all the time like we do. Our papers are printed and edited in Scotland but I don't tend to read papers much. It's the TV and Radio media who is Southern biased (probably ****es off the northern English just as much when the story is not a national one like the World Cup). All we have had for the past few weeks is stories of what's happening in the English camp and how English won't meet Brazil until the final like it was cast in stone that they would make it that far.
Take the weather reports as an example of the southern bias. What do you think it feels like living in Aberdeen when we hear the weather in the North is going to be good or bad and we see that they are speaking about Manchester. Aberdeen is as far from Manchester as Manchester is from the English Channel and there is still a couple of hundred miles to the North coast of the mainland. Then another few hundred to the tip of Shetland. If this doesn't make it plane to see that something is wrong nothing will.
Rant over. Please don't take any of this football England Scotland thing too seriously. Football and other sports national team sports are only used because it gives us a change to make the point that we do exist and do have a different national identity.
