England the brave - Union Jock by Aidan Smith

FOR MANY OF US NORTH OF THE border, the recent Euro 2008 festival of football was all the more enjoyable for the absence of the England team and the media hysteria which would inevitably have accompanied them.

England are a hard team to love. With pampered, prima donna millionaire players, jingoistic, arrogant and delusional commentators and pundits, and a reputation for xenophobic and aggressive fans, it's easy for Scots to look south with smug disdain and buckets of schadenfreude when they inevitably bow out of a tournament, having never lived up to the hype.

With this in mind, Aidan Smith has some amount of balls. The feature writer for our sister paper, Scotland on Sunday, is a lifelong Scotland fan, having learned on his dad's knee while watching the dreaded 1966 World Cup Final that, whatever else he does in life, he must always support whoever England are playing. So how, exactly, did he find himself following England at the 2006 World Cup?

This lunacy doesn't spring out of nowhere. Smith's first book, Heartfelt, was a funny and perceptive account of a season he spent following Hearts, the arch club rivals of his own beloved team Hibs. This book repeats and extends that idea, Smith gallantly trying to get behind "Team England" as they attempted to end 40 years of hurt and bring the World Cup back from Germany two years ago. But there is something unrelated to football driving this mission.

That same summer Smith married an Englishwoman, and a posh one at that, and in the run-up to the big day he was beginning to question his anti- English sentiments, the ones inherited from his now deceased father, playwright W Gordon Smith.

So, can a Scotsman ever really cheer for "Ingerland"? Well, as Smith finds out, the answer isn't a simple one. Union Jock is an intelligent and engaging look at not just a huge football rivalry but the complex and often paradoxical relationship between Scotland and its bigger neighbour.

And Smith couldn't have picked a better time to do it. With Jack McConnell declaring support for anyone but England and Gordon Brown down south, with one eye on the Prime Minister's post, declaring his support for England, a real stramash erupted in the media that summer about whether Scots should be supporting their rivals at the tournament. A genuinely antagonistic atmosphere was generated by some newspapers, and through this minefield steps Smith, intent on finding a path which makes some kind of sense.

The writing in Union Jock is often brilliant. Smith is at his best when ranting about the pretensions and delusions of "Team England" (that horrible phrase comes in for a good kicking). There are two particularly genius moments when he draws out long analogies between the England team and the films of Richard Curtis, and again, compares David Beckham with Tom Cruise, both of which had me weeping with laughter.

The other thing that Smith is great at is description of character. Although he never actually attends an England World Cup match (a small failing of the book), he does make it to Germany, and his accounts of meeting fans there, as well as encounters he has in the unlikely environs of a gay bar in Brighton and a Rangers pub in Glasgow (don't ask), cast real insight into the lot of the average, or not so average, England fan.

The book is not without its occasional lapses. There is a little too much of Smith's own family background and scene setting at the start, when you long for him to cut to the chase and get on with the World Cup already.

Also, there is a slightly dated feel to some of the politics, inevitable in a way, but it's surprising how much the national mood seems to have moved on in both England and Scotland in the two years since the action here took place.

And one more slight personal gripe – he's wrong, in my opinion, to give Alan Hansen the benefit of the doubt. Very wrong. But maybe that's something to be discussed over a leisurely pint.

But these are minor faults in an entertaining, thought-provoking and hilarious read. In one sense, this is a very Scottish book. By the end, Smith has not found himself converted to the cause of "Team England", unable to paint a cross of St George on his face, but he has found a great deal of empathy with the team's long-suffering and mostly fair-minded fans. So in respect of Smith's initial aim, to support England, Union Jock is technically a failure, but it's a glorious failure, and what's more Scottish than that?

UNION JOCK BY AIDAN SMITH Yellow Jersey, 265pp, £12.99