There is still another week to wait until Scotland take to the field at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, to play Haiti in front of a sell-out 65,000-strong crowd in their opening Group C match.
Will the population of the country, already in a state of high excitement at the prospect of the national team taking part in the greatest show on planet football for the first time in 28 long years, be able to cope with seven more days of build-up?
Fans of Aberdeen and Arbroath, Celtic and Clyde, Falkirk and Forfar Athletic, Hibernian and Hamilton, Motherwell and Montrose, have been infected by World Cup fever. It will be something of a relief when the tournament finally gets underway.
Are supporters of Rangers also counting down the hours until Scotland launch their bid to end 72 years of failure and frustration and reach the knockout rounds with breathless anticipation? That is not a straightforward question to answer.
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There are more followers of the Ibrox outfit, if you take their Glasgow rivals out of the equation, than every other club on these shores combined. Their fanbase comfortably, in a land of just five million people, numbers over a million.
Many of them have travelled to the United States to back Andy Robertson and Co despite the prohibitively expensive cost of flights, accommodation and tickets. Countless more will be flocking to fanzones and tuning in on television at home in the coming weeks.
The SFA revealed back in 2018 that there were more fans of Rangers in the Scotland Supporters’ Club than of any other club. Aberdeen were a distant second.
It is, though, fair to say that a sizeable proportion of those who cheer on a side in light blue jerseys on a weekly basis during the domestic season have a definite antipathy towards if not an outright contempt for the team which wears dark blue tops on the international stage. For myriad reasons.
The arrival of Terry Butcher, Trevor Francis, Paul Gascoigne, Mark Hateley, Graham Roberts, Trevor Steven, Gary Stevens, Ray Wilkins and Chris Woods in Govan during the 1980s and 1990s led to many Rangers supporters donning England strips – a practice that continues to this day.
The 12 game ban which the SFA imposed on Duncan Ferguson in 1994 after his head butt on Raith Rovers defender John McStay – a punishment which prompted the £4m striker to refuse international selection – angered the Rangers support greatly.
Their dislike of the governing body increased massively in the wake of their cataclysmic financial implosion in 2012. For many, the Hampden hierarchy could and really should have given them far greater support in their hour of need than they did.
The thought of sitting alongside fans of opposing clubs, individuals who had positively revelled in their misfortune at that traumatic time, at Scotland games also became unpalatable for some.
Then came the Scottish independence referendum two years later. Rangers have long had a strong British identity. God Save the King, not Flower of Scotland, is sung at Ibrox on match days. The prospect of the union ending was unthinkable for a lot of their fans and emotions ran high as the electorate went to the polls.
Then there is Steve Clarke. The Ayrshireman is about as popular a figure on Edmiston Drive as Chris Sutton. His detractors have a long list of grievances.
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He was accused of selective outrage during his time in charge of Kilmarnock when he hit out at the sectarian abuse which he had received from the home support in an emotional press conference after a heavy Scottish Cup defeat away in the February of 2019.
Where, it was widely asked, had his public indignation been when his forward Kris Boyd, a former Rangers player, had been struck by a coin and subjected to sickening chants by Celtic supporters just three days earlier?
Clarke did little to repair the relationship when he addressed fans of the Rugby Park club on the pitch after a final day victory over Steven Gerrard’s team at home a few months later and said, “Bye, bye Rangers”. He was appointed Scotland manager the following morning.
It has regularly, and wrongly, been claimed that he harbours an anti-Rangers bias in the seven years since. But the ridiculousness of those aspersions has been exposed by his recent squad selection. No fewer than four Ibrox men, Findlay Curtis, Liam Kelly, Lawrence Shankland and John Souttar, are over in the United States.
Shankland may have moved to his boyhood heroes from Hearts after being called up. Still, the 55-time Scottish champions have only had a quartet of players in the Scotland squad at a World Cup once before. Not since Sammy Baird, Eric Caldow, Ian McColl and Alex Scott were involved in Sweden way back in 1958 have they been so well represented.
Curtis, Shankland and Souttar all have a decent chance of playing, of starting even, in the forthcoming encounters with Haiti, Morocco and Brazil as well. Will their participation prompt Bears to, for a few weeks at least, put away their union flags and dig out their saltires? It is to be hoped so.
There was a time in the distant past, in the halcyon eras of Ian McMillan, Davie Wilson, Jim Baxter, Willie Henderson, John Greig, Ronnie McKinnon, Sandy Jardine, Colin Stein, Tam Forsyth and Willie Johnston, when the majority of the Scotland support was comprised of Rangers fans. It would help the national team no end if those days were to return.
Any Blue Nose who tells you they will not feel a deep sense of pride if Curtis skins Wesley, if Shankland beats Achraf Hakimi to a high ball or if Souttar cleans out Neymar is deluding themselves.
