Could Scotland’s rugby team be heroes if they tried ski jumping? - Vladimir McTavish

I do tune in for the curling but it’s only every four years that I remember it’s played all over the world now. The curling rinks may officially be Team GB, but are Scotland in all but name.

Most people like myself tend to watch events that are entertaining when things go wrong. Unless there is a serious injury, of course, it’s a laugh watching clowns fall over in the snow. Hence the popularity of Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards back in the late eighties. For young people he was a jovial idiot who somehow represented GB in ski jumping. How or why he got there is still a mystery.

However, I’ve never warmed to ice dancing, it’s like a mix of Eurovision and Strictly. I accidentally watched it for a minute, and was admiring the skater’s grace until he went into a high-speed pirouette, revolving for around a minute on his own axis. I then got very dizzy and switched the telly off.

But it was good to see Scottish involvement in the event. Lewis Gibson and partner came agonisingly close to a bronze. Likewise in the curling, when we just fell short against Italy, the second time in a week we’d been handed a lesson by the Azurri.

This followed behind the damp squib of a defeat by the rugby team in Rome, in a match played in rain that went beyond biblical to Glaswegian.

Today, it’s the small matter of England at Murrayfield. The perfect setting for a written-off Scotland to perform a heroic backs-to-the-wall victory? We so often do against the Auld Enemy, sending them homewards to think again.

But the men in white look very good right now. Let’s hope it’s not us thinking again tonight. Oh for a return to the good old days of joke English sporting heroes like Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards.