By Alan Pattullo

Published 23rd Oct 2024, 08:36 GMT

The promotional blurb for Dear Scotland claims this is Ally McCoist’s first book, which is hard to believe for someone who has been everywhere for so long – and also bankable.

McCoist has risen to the status of national treasure, and not only in Scotland. Take a look at social media whenever he’s commentating on a football match, his main occupation now after a trying spell as manager of his beloved Rangers, and marvel at the adoration.

This is a love letter, or, as he puts it, thank you note to Scotland, the country he represented as a striker on 61 occasions. It’s also where he played almost all of his club football save for a short spell dipping his toe into English football with Sunderland.

Rather than Hampden or even Ibrox, the action kicks-off in a little village called Clachan in North Kintyre. It’s where Neil McCoist, his late father, grew up. McCoist continues to visit what he considers to be one of the most beautiful places on earth to this day. He feels a particularly deep connection because it’s the only link to his family’s past. As far as he’s aware, other than his own progeny, there are no other McCoists in the UK. Sounds plausible. I mean, do you know any McCoists?

Maybe it’s just as well. Having McCoist at the end of your name would set the bar intolerably high. McCoist, after all, was dubbed Golden Balls before David Beckham for his habit of always seeming to land on his feet.

The name Ally McCoist has an almost Roy Race-like quality, and it’s no wonder he’s finally been convinced to come up with a book, although the subject might surprise some. It’s not about Rangers for a start. But why does it need to be? At present sitting fifth in the all-time Scotland goalscorers’ list, McCoist explains he is a fully paid-up member of the Tartan Army. It says something about Scottish football's tribalism that he even feels the need to explain this.

Interestingly, his patriotism was stoked by attending a Scotland v England rugby match at Murrayfield, won by an Andy Irvine penalty kick – from near the touchline, rather than 12 yards out – in the dying moments. “That was the day my blood fully turned to tartan,” he explains. The anecdote helps illustrate McCoist’s almost universal appeal. It transcends sports and can even surmount the most fierce divide of all, the deep rift valleys separating the green side of Glasgow from the blue side.

One imagines a more full-blown autobiography in the future will deal with these more-weighty issues, but McCoist makes it clear that Rangers and Celtic factions did not impinge on manoeuvres with Scotland.

It helps that he saw another side of the game at St Johnstone, his first club, and later Kilmarnock. A double European Golden Boot winner, McCoist remains the last striker to score a goal for Scotland at a major finals, when thrashing home a winner v Switzerland at Euro 96. He also got the goal that took Scotland to the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

There have been setbacks, however, including a broken leg sustained in a 5-0 defeat to Portugal in 1993. As profound was the pain after being excluded from the World Cup squad at France '98 in the twilight of his career.

He was dismayed but kept his counsel. He notes that manager Craig Brown later publicly thanked him for not making a fuss. It rather sums up McCoist’s likeability. This quality has been adeptly packaged inside 200 or so pages, which makes for an enjoyably brisk let’s-just-forget-about-Euro2024-shall-we? read.

Does it matter that it can feel a bit formless, as if we're being taken round-the-houses and, thanks to some repetition, sometimes back round again? Not really.

This actually helps accentuate the sense of sitting down with one of Scotland’s greatest, most charismatic sportsmen for a blether over a cup of tea. And we’d surely all like to do that, wouldn’t we?

Dear Scotland: On the Road with the Tartan Army, by Ally McCoist, Hodder, £22

Dear Scotland, by Ally McCoist review: 'like a blether over a cup of tea'